London School of Economics and Political Science

Race, Capital, and the Politics of Solidarity:Radical Internationalism in the 21st Century

~

Ida Danewid

A thesis submitted to the Department of International Relations of the London School of Economics and Political Science for the Degree of Doctor of

Philosophy

London, August 2018

D E C L A R A T I O N

I certify that the thesis I have presented for examination for the MPhil/PhD degree of the London School of Economics and Political Science is solely my own work other than where I have clearly indicated that it is the work of others (in which case the extent of any work carried out jointly by me and any other person is clearly identified in it).

The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. Quotation from it is permitted, provided that full acknowledgement is made. This thesis may not be reproduced without my prior written consent.

I warrant that this authorisation does not, to the best of my belief, infringe the rights of any third party.

I declare that my thesis consists of 91,770 words.

A B S T R A C T

This thesis interrogates the absence of questions of race, colonialism, and their

contemporary legacies in the philosophical literature on global justice and cosmopolitan

ethics. What are the ethical, political, and material consequences of these “unspeakable

things unspoken”, and what would it mean for cosmopolitanism to take seriously the

problem of the global colour line? The thesis provides a tentative answer to these

questions through a close engagement with contemporary debates about the meaning

and purpose of international solidarity. It demonstrates that critical and liberal

approaches often help reproduce and legitimise, rather than challenge and transcend, the

current unjust and unequal racialized global order. Drawing on Cedric Robinson and the

literature on racial capitalism, it interrogates how solidarity can be decolonised and re-

conceived so as to better attend to the materiality of the global colour line. Through a

close reading of the European migrant crisis, recent forms of Black-Palestinian

solidarity, and the ongoing struggle for decolonisation in South Africa, it identifies an

alternative internationalist imaginary that grows out of the solidarities forged in the

struggle against imperialism, patriarchy, and racial capitalism. This is a radicalised and

decolonised emancipatory project which retrieves the idea of universal history and total

critique, but does so without invoking Eurocentric ideas of progress and teleology. In an

era of Trump, Brexit, and global fascist resurgence—where the “white working class”

frequently is juxtaposed with “immigrants”, and identity politics blamed for the demise

of the organised Left—such an internationalist vision is urgently needed.

What can I do?One must begin somewhere.

Begin what?The only thing in the world worth beginning:

The End of the world of course.– Aimé Césaire

A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S

The support, friendship, and love that sustained me over the last four years wove itself into a colourful quilt on which I've thought, read, traveled, and grown. My deepest thanks to:

Kirsten Ainley and Mark Hoffman, my PhD supervisors without whom this project would not have been possible.

Evelyn Pauls, the best side-kick, friend, and proof-reader one could wish for.

Ramón Grosfoguel, for introducing me to decolonial theory and hosting me at UC Berkeley.

Keith Feldman, whose “Cultural Studies Without Guarantees” course at UC Berkeley opened my eyes to the work of Stuart Hall.

Friends around and at the LSE: Ilaria Carrozza, Andrew Delatolla, Joanne Yao, Nawal Mustafa, Pilar Elizalde, Liane Hartnett, Helena Moac, Elitsa Garnizova, Alvina Hoffmann, Kerry Goettlich, Scott Hamilton, Aaron McKeil, and Andreas Nohr. For the support, discussions, and many hours at the George and White Horse.

Those who read and generously commented on my work: Robbie Shilliam, Louiza Odysseos, George Lawson, Rahul Rao, Chris Rossdale, Nivi Manchanda, Kerem Nisancioglu, Meera Sabaratnam, Chris Brown, Myriam Fotou, Joe Hoover and, in particular, Tarak Barkawi. You are endless sources of inspiration.

The Millennium family. You know who you are.

Ayah Al Zayat, my apricot. Ayah Ayah!

Jaideep Shah, for Kensington Gardens Square and the chai.

Shaka “Lish” Henderson, for the yoga, music, and politics.

Hanna Hagos, for the red wine and the tattoos.

Ursula Scott, Adam Hazlewood, Agi Gwara, and everyone else in the Soho Ashtanga yoga community: for the sweat and laughter.

Nanns & Tjubbz, my siblings in crime.

Nerma Kunovac, min tuffs.

Adam Almakroudi, for being the sunshine of my life. Tsay inou, Snoepje.

Mamms, for the constant stream of love, support, and Mörsjö.

Papps, for always believing in me. Det som inte dödar det härdar!

Much of this work was conceived while traveling. A big thank you to everyone that I met, discussed with, and learned from in Brazil, Barcelona, Berkeley, Amsterdam, Lisbon, and Indonesia.

Finally, this thesis is dedicated to my grandparents, Bomme & Månne: the many afternoons spent with you on Råbelövsgatan (reading, drinking tea, and discussing politics and art) made me the reading and writing person I am today. This is for you.

C O N T E N T S

I L L U S T R A T I O N S..................................................................................................1

I N T R O D U C T I O NIn Search of Solidarity...........................................................................................................2

International Political Theory and the Global Colour Line..........................................2Within “Shouting Distance” of Marxism: Racial Capitalism and the Colonial Question........................................................................................................................ 5Race and the Politics of Solidarity................................................................................ 9Radical Internationalism in Dark Times..................................................................... 12Chapter Outline........................................................................................................... 16

C H A P T E R 1 Cosmopolitanism and the Colonial Life of Ethics............................................................ 20

Introduction................................................................................................................. 20Can Solidarity Save Strangers? Liberalism and Empire............................................. 22Solidarity of the Shaken: Poststructuralism and Colonial Unknowing.......................31Solidarity From Below: Postcolonialism and the Elision of Political Economy .......37The Swindle................................................................................................................ 42Conclusion.................................................................................................................. 44

C H A P T E R 2From Revolution to Ethics: Historicizing the Cosmopolitan Turn................................47

Introduction................................................................................................................. 47Why Historize? A Marxist Approach to Political Theory........................................... 48Victorian Beginnings: 1848 and the White Man's Burden..........................................51The Turn to Ethics: 1968 and the Transformation of the Left....................................57The Humanitarian Melodrama: 1989 and the Rediscovery of the Third World ........63Conclusion.................................................................................................................. 70

C H A P T E R 3The Political Economy of Race: Rethinking the Global Colour Line............................. 73

Introduction................................................................................................................. 73Racial Capitalism and the Global Colour Line........................................................... 77Reproductive Racial Capitalism..................................................................................84Ghettos, Slums, Favelas: Neoliberalism and the Global Production of Surplus Humanity.....................................................................................................................86Conclusion.................................................................................................................. 91

C H A P T E R 4Identity Politics and the Class Struggle: Towards a New Internationalism...................93

Introduction................................................................................................................. 93The Colour Line and the Assembly Line.................................................................... 95The Common Cause Is Freedom.................................................................................99Revolutionary Solidarity and the Politics of Internationalism..................................104Conclusion.................................................................................................................110

C H A P T E R 5The Drowned and the Saved: Circuits of Resistance in the Black Mediterranean........112

Introduction.......................................................................................................... 112

Borders and the Politics of Solidarity...................................................................115The Black Mediterranean: Racial Capitalism and the Political Economy of Migration.............................................................................................................. 118White Innocence...................................................................................................125Near and Far Peripheries: Connected Geographies of Resistance.......................128Conclusion............................................................................................................132

C H A P T E R 6#Palestine2Ferguson: Empire and the Global Security Archipelago............................134

Introduction............................................................................................................... 134Citizen? An American Dream................................................................................... 137“No Vietnamese Ever Called Me Nigger”: The Lessons of Black Internationalism 145The (Post)Colonial Boomerang: Race and the Global Security Archipelago...........151From Ferguson to Palestine: Entangled Geographies of Resistance.........................158Conclusion................................................................................................................ 162

C H A P T E R 7Things Fall Apart: Contesting Settler Colonialism, in South Africa and Beyond........165

Introduction............................................................................................................... 165“Our South Africa Moment Has Arrived”: Boycotting Israel...................................168The Limits of Rainbowism: From National Liberation to Neoliberalism................174The Settler Colonial Present..................................................................................... 179The Art of Falling: From Recognition to Abolition.................................................. 184Conclusion................................................................................................................ 188

C H A P T E R 8Universal History Without Guarantees............................................................................ 191

Introduction............................................................................................................... 191Different Fronts of the Same War............................................................................. 193Universal History and Its Discontents...................................................................... 195Interrupting History: Unhistorical Histories and Counternarratives.........................198Pearl Divers: To Know the Time On the Clock of the World...................................201Conclusion................................................................................................................ 204

C O N C L U S I O NStrikers in Saris: Poetry of the Future..............................................................................206

B I B L I O G R A P H Y..................................................................................................213

I L L U S T R A T I O N S

Front page: Douglas, Emory. Justice Scales. Original image 1976; repurposed 2015 (Artists Rights Society, New York)

Fig. 1: Crane, Walter. Imperial Federation Map of the World Showing the Extent of the British Empire in 1886. 1886 (Boston Public Library, Boston)

Fig. 2: UCT students protest against the occupation in Palestine. Retrieved August 3, 2018, from https://www.facebook.com/UCTPSF/photos/pcb.2129352310416220/ 2129348807083237/?type=3&theater. Screenshot by author.

Fig. 3: Scenes from the film Moonlight. 2016. Directed by Barry Jenkins. A24 and Plan B Entertainment, New York City and Los Angeles. Retrieved April 5, 2018, from https://www.nytimes.com/video/movies/100000004787538/anatomy-of-a-scene-moonlight.htm l . Screenshot by author.

Fig. 4: Jayaben Desai at the picket line at Grunwick, 1977 (Graham Wood/Getty Images: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/dec/28/jayaben-desai-obituary)

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I N T R O D U C T I O N

In Search of Solidarity

“The radical nationalist movements of our time in Africa and the African diaspora have come at an historical moment when substantial numbers of the world's Black peoples are under the threat of physical annihilation or the promise of prolonged and frightening debilitation. The famines which have always accompanied the capitalist world-system's penetration of societies have increased in intensity and frequency. The appearance of literally millions of Black refugees, drifting helplessly beyond the threshold of human sensibility, their emaciated bodies feeding on their own tissues, have become commonplace. The systematic attack on radical Black polities, and the manipulation of venal political puppets are now routine occurrences. Where Blacks were once assured of some sort of minimal existence as a source of cheap labor, mass unemployment and conditions of housing and health which are of near-genocidal proportions obtain. The charades of neo-colonialism and race relations have worn thin. In the metropoles, imprisonment, the stupor of drugs, the use of lethal force by public authorities and private citizens, and the more petty humiliations of racial discrimination have become epidemic. And over the heads of all, but most particularly those of the Third World, hangs the discipline of massive nuclear force. Not one day passes without confirmation of the availability and the willingness to use force in the Third World. It is not the province of one people to be the solution or the problem. But a civilization maddened by its own perverse assumptions and contradictions is loose in the world. A Black radical tradition formed in opposition to that civilization and conscious of itself is one of part of the solution. Whether the other oppositions generated from within Western society and without will mature remains problematical. But for now we must be as one.”1

International Political Theory and the Global Colour Line

There is something ghost-like about these words with which Cedric Robinson

concludes Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Written almost

40 years ago, they seem to speak directly to our contemporary era of Trumpism, Brexit,

mass drownings in the Mediterranean, racialized police brutality, the global “war on

terror”, environmental degradation, ongoing settler colonialism, neoliberal restructuring,

and widening global inequality. The global colour line, which W.E.B. Du Bois famously

described as the problem of the 20th century, still casts its shadow over the world.

Indeed, while formal colonial rule ended almost fifty years ago, colonial relations of

1 Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, 2 edition (Chapel Hill, N.C: University North Carolina Pr, 2000), 317–8.

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power remain significant in a number of ways: the world's eight richest billionaires

currently have the same wealth as the poorest half of the world2; 1 out of 10 people live

in extreme poverty;3 815 million of the world's population are chronically

undernourished;4 10% of the world's population do not have access to safe and

uncontaminated water;5 and 21 children die every minute from preventable causes.6 That

there is something terribly wrong with this world—and that it is structured along lines

of race—seems obvious: as clear today as it was in 1983, when Robinson completed

Black Marxism. And yet, to many it is not.7

In this thesis I interrogate the absence of questions of race, colonialism, and their

contemporary legacies in the philosophical literature on global justice and cosmopolitan

ethics.8 While there in recent years has been a post- and decolonial drive for more

global, non-Eurocentric scholarship,9 the fields of ethical and moral inquiry have

2 Deborah Hardoon, “An Economy for the 99%: It’s Time to Build a Human Economy That Benefits Everyone, Not Just the Privileged Few,” Briefing Paper (Oxfam, 2017), https://policy-practice.oxfam.org.uk/publications/an-economy-for-the-99-its-time-to-build-a-human-economy-that-benefits-everyone-620170.

3 See the World Poverty Clock, https://worldpoverty.io 4 Statistics available at https://www.worldhunger.org/world-hunger-and-poverty-facts-and-statistics/ 5 “Progress on Drinking Water, Sanitation and Hygiene: 2017 Update and Sustainable Development

Goal Baselines” (United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), World Health Organization (WHO), 2017), https://www.unicef.org/publications/index_96611.html.

6 See https://www.unicef.org/mdg/childmortality.html 7 In this thesis I approach race, not as a pre-political, biological characteristic, but a social construct

brought into being by social, economic, and political forces. In Nicholas De Genova's apt formulation, “race is not a fact of nature, but a socio-political fact of domination.” Importantly, race thus conceived is not reducible to skin-colour (which is a marker of racism), but instead describes a relation of subordination drawn along the line of the human. See Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (Routledge, 2014); Nicholas De Genova, “The ‘migrant Crisis’ as Racial Crisis: Do Black Lives Matter in Europe?,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 0, no. 0 (August 21, 2017): 6, https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2017.1361543. See also Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California Press, 2007), 28.

8 Following Thomas Pogge, I refer to cosmopolitanism as both a political project and normative perspective. Thomas W. Pogge, “Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty,” Ethics 103, no. 1 (1992): 48–75. As Patrick Hayden explains, according to cosmopolitanism “international politics should focus first on the interests, rights or welfare of persons, wherever they may reside rather than on the interests of states as such.” Cosmopolitanism is thus “the articulation of a set of moral principles as well as a commitment to the establishment of political institutions that support those principles.” Patrick Hayden, “Cosmopolitanism Past and Present,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Ethics and International Relations, ed. Patrick Hayden (Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2009), 43–4.

9 Indicatively, see Alexander Anievas, Nivi Manchanda, and Robbie Shilliam, Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line (Routledge, 2014); Gurminder K. Bhambra, Connected Sociologies (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014); John M. Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics : Western International Theory, 1760-2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Branwen Gruffydd Jones, Decolonizing International Relations (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006); Meera Sabaratnam, Decolonising Intervention: International Statebuilding in Mozambique (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017); Sanjay Seth, Postcolonial Theory and International Relations: A Critical Introduction (Routledge, 2013); Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations, The United States in the World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015). See also the special issue in Millennium: Journal of International Studies on “Racialized Realities in World Politics”, vol. 45, no. 3.

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remained largely insulated from this critique. Race continues to be seen as a domestic

issue or historical phenomenon and, thus, as something that is of little or no relevance

for addressing questions of justice in 21st century world politics. This is despite the fact

that 85% of the world, until not so long ago, was under some form of colonial control;

as decolonial theorist Anibal Quijano explains, “if we observe the main lines of

exploitation and social domination on a global scale, the main lines of world power

today, and the distribution of resources and work among the world population, it is very

clear that the large majority of the exploited, the dominated, the discriminated against,

are precisely the members of the 'races', 'ethnies', or 'nations' into which the colonized

populations, were categorized in the formative process of that world power, from the

conquest of America and onward.”10

These blind spots are not unique to the literature on cosmopolitanism and global

ethics. As Sankaran Krishna has shown, “the discipline of International Relations was

and is predicated on a systematic politics of forgetting, a wilful amnesia, on the question

of race.”11 In recent years scholars such as John Hobson, Branwen Jones, and Robert

Vitalis have traced the discipline's imperial and racialized origins. In White World

Order, Black Power Politics Vitalis documents how, at the moment of its inception,

“international relations meant race relations.”12 The original purpose of IR, he argues,

was to help maintain and expand white supremacy; race wars, not inter-state conflict,

was what occupied the first IR theorists. In an effort to “white-out” these racial

underpinnings, contemporary IR has turned questions of race and colonialism into a

“taboo.”13 Recent scholarship has described this as an “epistemology of ignorance”14; as

10 Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (March 1, 2007): 168–9, https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601164353 As Alexander Anievas, Nivi Manchanda, and Robbie Shilliam make clear, world order is still “constitutively... structured, re-structured and contested along lines of race.” Alexander Anievas, Nivi Manchanda, and Robbie Shilliam, “Confronting the Global Colour Line: An Introduction,” in Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line, ed. Alexander Anievas, Nivi Manchanda, and Robbie Shilliam (Routledge, 2014), 7.

11 Sankaran Krishna, “Race, Amnesia, and the Education of International Relations,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 26, no. 4 (2001): 401, https://doi.org/10.2307/40645028.

12 Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics, 1.13 Srdjan Vucetic, “Against Race Taboos: The Global Colour Line in Philosophical Discourse,” in Race

and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line, ed. Alexander Anievas, Nivi Manchanda, and Robbie Shilliam (Routledge, 2014). See also Robert Vitalis, “The Graceful and Generous Liberal Gesture: Making Racism Invisible in American International Relations,” Millennium 29, no. 2 (June 1, 2000): 331–56, https://doi.org/10.1177/03058298000290020701.

14 See the collection of essays in Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (SUNY Press, 2007). See also Charles W. Mills, “Global White Ignorance,” in Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies, ed. Matthias Gross and Linsey McGoey, 2015.

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a “calculated forgetting”15 or “norm against noticing”16 through which those with power

and privilege tell themselves and others, not only that the world is postcolonial and

postracial, but also that the long history of colonialism, racialized indentured servitude,

indigenous genocide, and transatlantic slavery have left no traces in culture, language,

and knowledge production. This is not a passive act of forgetting; rather, and as Manu

Vimalassery, Juliana Hu Pegeus, and Aloysha Goldstein remind us, it is “aggressively

made and reproduced, affectively invested and effectively distributed in ways that

conform the social relations and economies of the here and now.”17

In this thesis I argue that these “unspeakable things unspoken”18 are particularly

problematic for cosmopolitan political theory. How can a field which defines itself as a

humanistic discourse on global justice and the moral dimensions of world politics have

had so little to say about the racial ordering of the international? What has the absence

of questions of race and colonialism made possible? And, crucially, what would it mean

for cosmopolitanism to take seriously the problem of the global colour line? These are

the questions that motivate this study.

Within “Shouting Distance” of Marxism: Racial Capitalism and the Colonial Question

The few attempts that have been made within the cosmopolitan literature to

address questions of race and colonialism have predominantly focused on historical

responsibility and reparative justice. Charles Mills, for example, has argued that the

overall framing of global justice needs to be self-consciously rethought to account for

the crimes committed through racial slavery and colonial conquest. Reparative justice—

rather than ideal theory and distributive models of justice—is needed to address “the

legacy of the unfair global racial structure, established by colonialism and imperialism,

white settlement and African slavery, that tendentially privileges whites globally.”19 A

similar argument is made by Daniel Butt in Rectifying International Injustice. Butt

suggests that the descendants of the victims of past forms of injustice—such as

15 Debra Thompson, “Through, Against, and Beyond the Racial State: The Transnational Stratum of Race,” in Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line, ed. Alexander Anievas, Nivi Manchanda, and Robbie Shilliam (Routledge, 2014), 45.

16 Vitalis, “The Graceful and Generous Liberal Gesture,” 333.17 Manu Vimalassery, Juliana Hu Pegues, and Aloysha Goldstein, “On Colonial Unknowing,” Theory &

Event 19, no. 4 (2016).18 Toni Morrison, Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature

(University of Michigan, 1989).19 Charles W. Mills, “Race and Global Justice,” in Domination and Global Political Justice: Conceptual,

Historical, and Institutional Perspectives, ed. Barbara Buckinx, Jonathan Trejo-Mathys, and Timothy Waligore (Routledge, 2015), 198.

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transatlantic slavery and other forms of colonial domination—are entitled to

compensation.20 These interventions are not without merit; however, they construct the

time of the “now” as separate and distinct from the “past.” By focusing on past wrongs,

they thus treat the problem of the global colour line as a historical issue only.

In contrast to this literature, in this thesis I approach race and colonialism, not

as discrete events that belong to the past, but as enduring forms of structural injustice.21

Drawing on Cedric Robinson—with whose haunting words I opened this chapter—I

develop a materialist conception of the global colour line. As Robinson reminds us,

capitalism has always been racial capitalism.22 The accumulation of capital has

historically operated through racial projects that assign differential value to human life

and labour, such as chattel slavery, settler colonial dispossession, racialized indentured

servitude, and exploitation of immigrant labour. The history of capitalism began with

the slave trade and not with the factory system; in fact, there was never such a thing as

capitalism without slavery, and “the history of Manchester never happened without the

history of Mississippi.”23 As Lisa Lowe explains, the concept of racial capitalism thus

captures “that capitalism expands not through rendering all labor, resources, and

markets across the world identical, but by precisely seizing upon colonial divisions,

20 Daniel Butt, Rectifying International Injustice: Principles of Compensation and Restitution Between Nations (OUP Oxford, 2009). See also Catherine Lu, “Colonialism as Structural Injustice: Historical Responsibility and Contemporary Redress*,” Journal of Political Philosophy 19, no. 3 (September 1, 2011): 261–81, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9760.2011.00403.x.

21 Structural injustice, as theorised by Iris Marion Young, refers to social processes that “put large categories of persons under a systematic threat of domination or deprivation of the means to develop and exercise their capacities, at the same time as these processes enable others to dominate or have a wide range of opportunities for developing and exercising their capacities.” Iris Marion Young, “Responsibility and Global Justice:A Social Connection Model,” in Justice and Global Politics: Volume 23, ed. Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller Jr, and Jeffrey Paul (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 114. Young's concept of structural injustice is similar to Johan Galtung's theorisations of structural violence, which refers to a de-personalized form of violence that is built into social arrangements. See Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research 6, no. 3 (September 1, 1969): 167–91, https://doi.org/10.1177/002234336900600301.

22 Robinson, Black Marxism. See also Gilmore, Golden Gulag; Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin, Futures of Black Radicalism (Verso Books, 2017); Robin D. G. Kelley, “What Did Cedric Robinson Mean by Racial Capitalism?,” Text, Boston Review, January 12, 2017, http://bostonreview.net/race/robin-d-g-kelley-what-did-cedric-robinson-mean-racial-capitalism; Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Duke University Press, 2015); Jodi Melamed, “Racial Capitalism,” Critical Ethnic Studies 1, no. 1 (2015): 76–85, https://doi.org/10.5749/jcritethnstud.1.1.0076; David Roediger, Class, Race and Marxism (Verso Books, 2017).

23 Walter Johnson, “To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Justice,” Text, Boston Review, October 19, 2016, https://bostonreview.net/race/walter-johnson-slavery-human-rights-racial-capitalism. See also Gilmore, Golden Gulag; Johnson and Lubin, Futures of Black Radicalism; Kelley, “What Did Cedric Robinson Mean by Racial Capitalism?”; Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents; Melamed, “Racial Capitalism”; Roediger, Class, Race and Marxism; Robin D. G. Kelley, “Introduction,” in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, by Cedric J. Robinson, 2000.

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identifying particular regions for production and others for neglect, certain populations

for exploitation and still others for disposal.”24 Race, then, is neither reducible to class,

nor is it a separate form of oppression. Instead, capitalism relies upon the elaboration,

reproduction, and exploitation of racial difference: on the invention of what Robinson

calls “the universal Negro.” Capitalism is ultimately racial, not merely because people

racialized as non-white are disproportionately impacted and disadvantaged by the “free”

market, although this is true as well.25 More fundamentally, racial differences are

constitutive of capitalism because processes of capital accumulation are themselves

predicated on the devaluation of Black and other non-white people. Hence the term

racial capitalism.

To read the global colour line in this way—through the lens of historical

materialism and political economy—is at once a critique of liberal scholarship that tends

to confine colonialism to a distant time and era, as well as of postcolonial approaches

that often privilege cultural and intertextual analysis over and above the structural and

the material. Before the emergence and consolidation of postcolonial studies as an

academic field in the 1970s and 80s, anti-colonial thinkers and revolutionaries

predominantly framed their struggle against racial violence and colonial domination

through a Marxist lens. This relationship was never easy, as George Ciccariello-Maher

has shown, because orthodox Marxism's Eurocentrism, historical determinism, and

singular emphasis on the (white) proletariat as the revolutionary class of history often

seemed out of touch with the struggles against racism and colonialism.26 Nonetheless, in

confronting these limitations and blind spots, thinkers such Cedric Robinson—alongside

W.E.B. Du Bois, Aimé Césaire, Oliver Cromwell Cox, Angela Davis, Frantz Fanon,

C.L.R. James, Claudia Jones, Huey Newton, and many others—pushed Marxist thinking

in new and innovative directions that linked the critique of economic exploitation to the

critique of racial-colonial oppression, at home and abroad. In the aftermath of the events

of 1989 when, in Eduardo Galeano's striking phrase, we were all “invited to the world

burial of socialism”,27 this focus on racial capitalism faded into the background. Where

Black radicals and anti-colonial thinkers had turned to Marx and historical materialism,

today's postcolonial theory has predominantly come to rely on the linguistic and

24 Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents.25 For example, see Akwugo Emejulu and Leah Bassel, “Minority Women, Austerity and Activism,”

Race & Class, October 2, 2015, https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396815595913.26 George Ciccariello-Maher, Decolonizing Dialectics (Duke University Press, 2017).27 Galeano, quoted in Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus, Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial

Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 2.

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culturally inflected analysis of poststructuralism. The result has been a jettisoning of

political economy, a failure to interrogate the ways in which race and colonialism are

part of the historical unfolding of capitalism, and a relative detachment from

emancipatory politics; feeding a growing consensus “on the political left as well as the

right—that capitalism is an untranscendable horizon.”28 In this climate, Black and other

minority ethnic struggles against racism have largely been reconfigured as identity-

based mobilisations for recognition, alongside feminist, environmental, LGBTQ, and

other social movements. As Satnam Virdee explains,

“Since the 1990s, research within the field of racism and ethnicity studies has tended to focus on the cultural at the expense of the economic; on the theory and politics of recognition and understanding difference rather than the theory and politics of inequality and redistribution. Sustained accounts of racism and its articulation with class development of capitalism in the age of globalism are rare... reflecting this altered state of affairs has been the almost wholesale abandonment of the workplace and its institutions as a legitimate site of study to explore how racism works. And with it of course have gone the workers—black, brown and white.”29

To counter this trend, in this thesis I develop a global political economic critique

of race and racism. Remaining within “shouting distance” of Marxism, as David Scott

so aptly has put it30, I reconceptualise the global colour line as a racial ontology that

enables the hyper-exploitation of non-white peoples and lands, while privileging others.

As critical race theorist George Lipsitz explains, “the racisms that shape social relations

around the globe are remnants of previous systems of servitude and segregation, to be

sure, but they are also products of contemporary capitalism's ability to profit from new

forms of differentiation that permit the exploitation of gendered and racialized labor

within and across regional and national sites.”31 In this thesis I focus on two key aspects

in which racial capitalism reproduces the global colour line: first, the violent surplussing

of populations racialized as non-white; and second, the racialized violence of the penal

28 For a materialist critique of postcolonial studies, see—indicatively—Bartolovich and Lazarus, Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies; Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (Verso Books, 2013); Neil Lazarus, “What Postcolonial Theory Doesn’t Say,” Race & Class 53, no. 1 (July 1, 2011): 3–27, https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396811406778; Sandro Mezzadra, “How Many Histories of Labour? Towards a Theory of Postcolonial Capitalism,” Postcolonial Studies 14, no. 2 (June 1, 2011): 151–70, https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2011.563458; Benita Parry, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (Routledge, 2004).

29 Satnam Virdee, “Challenging the Empire,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 37, no. 10 (August 24, 2014): 1827, https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2014.932408.

30 David Scott, “Stuart Hall’s Ethics,” Small Axe 9, no. 1 (2005): 4.31 George Lipsitz, “Abolition Democracy and Global Justice,” Comparative American Studies An

International Journal 2, no. 3 (August 1, 2004): 283, https://doi.org/10.1177/1477570004047906.

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and national security state. While the neoliberal reordering of the world economy has

led to a reconfiguration of these dynamics, racialized (and gendered32) forms of

domination continue to pattern global politics—albeit in new forms, fit for the

postcolonial and multicultural present.

Race and the Politics of Solidarity

What would it mean for the philosophical literature on global justice and

cosmopolitan ethics to take seriously the enduring logic of race and the many afterlives

of historical and ongoing colonialism? In this thesis I provide a tentative answer to this

question through a close engagement with contemporary cosmopolitan debates on the

meaning and purpose of international solidarity. Solidarity provides a particularly useful

lens for analysing cosmopolitanism's racial caesuras. This is not only because all

cosmopolitan approaches are underpinned by some form of solidaristic commitment, but

also because the concept of solidarity has gained a sense of urgency over the last few

years. In the wake of the global migrant crisis, the movement for Black lives in the

United States and beyond, #StandWithStandingRock, the ongoing occupation of

Palestine, and the rise of populist, far right, anti-immigrant, xenophobic, and racist

political parties throughout the global North, a growing number of academics, activists,

and artists have called for solidarity with the plight of migrants, racialized minorities,

and Indigenous peoples. In the field of IR, the cosmopolitan literature on solidarity has

“ballooned” since the early 1990s, in part because of the public adoption of the term in

global activist and civil society campaigns, but also because of the renewed

philosophical interest in questions of global ethics and responsibility.33 There is of

course no such thing as a cosmopolitan conception of solidarity: definitions range from

32 While in this thesis I predominantly focus on race and class, there is much to suggest that this analysis can be extended to gender. The regulation of intimacy, sexuality, desire, and female reproductive labour is not only central to the process of capital accumulation, but should also be seen as central to the (re)production of the global colour line. For a more detailed discussion, see the section on “Reproductive Racial Capitalism” in chapter 3. See also, indicatively, Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915 (Univ of North Carolina Press, 2000); Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (Falling Wall Press Ltd, 1975); Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Duke University Press, 2008); Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (Zed Books Ltd., 2014); Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, & Class (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011); Nayan Shah, Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West (University of California Press, 2012); Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (University of California Press, 2002).

33 Sally J. Scholz, “Seeking Solidarity,” Philosophy Compass 10, no. 10 (2015): 725–35, https://doi.org/10.1111/phc3.12255.

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“the disposition to act towards vulnerable others without the anticipation of

reciprocation”34 (Chouliaraki); the obligation “to help people who are beyond one’s own

borders”35 (Coicaud and Wheeler); the preparedness of “taking responsibility” for one

who “has formed his identity under completely different circumstances”36 (Habermas); a

general feeling of sympathy or empathy for others37 (Rorty); a precondition for global

democracy38 (Brunkhorst); “a struggle against powerful tendencies in the modern age to

divide the world into camps and to idealise one camp as much as we demonise the

other”39 (Fine); and the inclination to view all human lives as equally grievable40

(Butler). In spite of these differences, these cosmopolitan approaches all put forward a

vision of solidarity that transcends historical, cultural, and territorial borders, and that

offers an alternative to communitarian and nationalist accounts that limit solidarity to

those bound by common nationality, ethnicity, religion, citizenship, and so on. As

Vivienne Jabri explains, cosmopolitan theories of solidarity are based on “the

assumption that the realm of the international, a location defined in terms of sovereign

statehood, is somehow reined in, challenged, by another realm, that of the human.”41

Ultimately, for these thinkers a global, cosmopolitan solidarity is necessary to confront

the large-scale dilemmas of the contemporary world, including global poverty,

widespread human rights abuse, international mass migration, environmental

catastrophes, civil wars, and the ever-present growing disparity between the privileged

and the poor.

In this thesis I explore the limits and possibilities of such calls for solidarity

beyond borders. In the first part I examine how, why, and with what effect questions of

race and colonialism continue to be silenced in discussions about international (or

cosmopolitan) solidarity. I argue that liberal as well as critical approaches work to

reproduce and legitimise, rather than challenge and transcend, the current unjust and

34 Lilie Chouliaraki, The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post-Humanitarianism (John Wiley & Sons, 2013), 106.

35 Jean-Marc Coicaud and Nicholas J. Wheeler, National Interest and International Solidarity: Particular and Universal Ethics in International Life (New York: United Nations University Press, 2008), 3.

36 Jürgen Habermas, Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory (John Wiley & Sons, 2015), 29.37 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge University Press, 1989).38 Hauke Brunkhorst, Solidarity: From Civic Friendship To A Global Legal Community (MIT Press,

2005).39 Robert Fine, “The Idea of Cosmopolitan Solidarity,” in Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitanism

Studies (Routledge, 2012), 384, https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9780203837139.ch31.

40 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2010).41 Vivienne Jabri, “Solidarity and Spheres of Culture: The Cosmopolitan and the Postcolonial,” Review

of International Studies 33, no. 4 (2007): 714, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210507007747.

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unequal racialized global order. While cosmopolitan calls for solidarity with the

vulnerable, downtrodden, and marginalised peoples of the world might give the

appearance of contributing to an emancipatory political project, in reality they obfuscate

how the modern world system was founded on, and continues as, a hierarchical racial

order. Like the civilising missions of the 19th century, these discourses are heavily

dependent on a racialized and gendered “imaginative geography”42 that divides the

world into “the third world individual living within a nation of danger and the first

world rescuers residing in a space of safety and enlightened freedom.”43 By addressing

the first world as a bystander to, rather than beneficiary of, current injustices,

cosmopolitan calls for solidarity not only produce the first world as intrinsically “good”,

“ethical”, and “humanitarian”, but they also render invisible the continuities between

past and current forms of violence and privilege. The result is a grand narrative

structured around binaries of good/evil and saviours/victims which, as Stephen

Hopgood has argued, “gives an ideological alibi to a global system whose governance

structures sustain persistent unfairness and blatant injustice.”44

In the second half of the thesis, I demonstrate that a materialist reading of the

global colour line opens up space for new forms of solidarity and internationalism—

beyond the “master's tools”, in Audre Lorde's famous formulation. The concept of racial

capitalism demonstrates how different systems of oppression rely on one another in

complex ways: racism, sexism, and classism are not separate forms of oppression that

sometimes intersect, but an entangled and constitutive part of the capitalist world

system. This does not deny the uniqueness and specificity of local struggles, but

highlights their transnational character. That is, while the struggles against empire, white

supremacy, settler colonialism, gender subordination, and workers' exploitation are not

the same, they are fundamentally interlinked. By reconnecting and aligning different

struggles—struggles which might seem distinct and unrelated but which, when viewed

through the lens of racial capitalism, turn out to be closely related—a materialist reading

of the global colour line thus points to the importance of addressing racism, patriarchy,

settler colonialism, imperialism, and other interlocking violences simultaneously. 45

42 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2014), 49.43 Randall Williams, The Divided World: Human Rights and Its Violence (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 2010), 28.44 Stephen Hopgood, The Endtimes of Human Rights (Cornell University Press, 2013), 2.45 As I argue in chapter 4, this is not the same as intersectionality. Used to highlight the intersection of

“multiple oppressions” as experienced by individuals, contemporary formulations of intersectionality are often delinked from the systemic critique of capitalism. Where the vocabulary of class figures, it is, as Delia Aguilar has argued, “merely designating income, occupation, or lifestyle”, and ultimately

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The solidarity that emerges from this analysis is fundamentally different from

cosmopolitanism. In cosmopolitan scholarship, the question of solidarity has typically

been understood as a problem of how to overcome difference. While different thinkers

disagree on the exact foundation for solidarity, they typically understand it as a

universalising relation: as something that unfolds from the belief that all human beings

have equal moral standing within and belong to a single world community. In contrast to

these perspectives—which, as I argue in chapter 1, are haunted by a colonial logic—a

materialist reading of the global colour line opens up space for a different kind of

solidarity, based not on sameness but the struggle against interlocking oppressions under

racial capitalism. This is a revolutionary solidarity anchored in the intersectionality of

freedom struggles, rather than on abstract notions of what it means to be human. The

overall goal here not the creation of some form of a universal community based on law,

rights, and citizenship, as it is for many cosmopolitan thinkers. Instead, and as Bradley

Macdonald has argued, it seeks “to articulate localized issues and struggles into an

overall internationalism... It sees the necessity of understanding each particular struggle

in the world as part of larger drama.”46 Consequently, where cosmopolitan perspectives

often depict solidarity as a one-way street whereby powerful and privileged actors

extend empathy and charity to silent victims, solidarity thus conceived figures

subalterns as agents in a collective struggle against interlocking systems of oppression

under racial capitalism. While this is a project that is underwritten by universalism, it is

not one that follows from any supposed unity of humankind. Instead, I suggest, it arises

in opposition to the universalising thrust of racial capitalism—including the way in

which it depends on gender subordination, border-making practices, ongoing primitive

accumulation, the production of surplus populations, and the growth of a global

“security archipelago.”47

Radical Internationalism in Dark Times

The revolutionary solidarity outlined in this thesis has much to offer in our

“detached from mooring in the social relations of production.” This stands in sharp contrast to earlier formulations of intersectionality, such as that of the Combahee River Collective, Angela Davis, Selma James, and Maria Mies, which understood race and gender as constitutive elements of the inner logic of capital. See chapter 4 and Delia D. Aguilar et al., “Tracing the Roots of Intersectionality,” MR Online (blog), April 12, 2012, https://mronline.org/2012/04/12/aguilar120412-html/.

46 Bradley J. Macdonald, Performing Marx: Contemporary Negotiations of a Living Tradition (SUNY Press, 2012), 147.

47 Paul Amar, The Security Archipelago: Human-Security States, Sexuality Politics, and the End of Neoliberalism (Duke University Press, 2013).

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contemporary era of Trumpism, Brexit, and global fascist resurgence. As Kyriakides and

Torres make clear, ours is an age where solidarity has come to seem difficult at best;

where older visions of Third World, non-aligned, and coalitional politics have fractured

into multiple “ethnically determined subjects of identity in competition not only for a

shred of an ever-shrinking economic settlement but for recognition of their suffering

conferred by a nation-state in which the Right won the political battle and the Left won

the culture war.”48 The juxtaposition of the “white working class” with “immigrants”

offers one of the starkest example of this fracturing of solidarity. Indeed, according to

hegemonic narratives white workers were not only responsible for the Brexit vote and

the election of Donald Trump, but are also the main engine behind the rise of populist,

far-right, anti-immigrant, xenophobic, and racist political parties throughout the global

North. The rise of fascist populism, it is often argued, has to be seen as a counter-

revolution to the post-WWII period, which has privileged identity politics at the expense

of socio-economic inequality, and thus paid too much attention to questions of race,

gender, and sexuality, and not enough to class. A New York Times column by Columbia

professor Mark Lilla published shortly after the US presidential election captures this

sentiment: a focus on identity politics, Lilla argued, had cost the Democrats the

election.49 By emphasising difference at the expense of commonalities and fetishising

the virtues of minorities, identity politics had alienated “the demos living between the

coasts” and undermined the possibility of creating a progressive coalition based on

class. “Left behind” by deindustrialisation, globalisation, affirmative action, and identity

politics, white workers had increasingly begun to feel like “strangers in their own

land.”50 In 2016 they thus voted to take back control.

This narrative is problematic for a number of reasons, as several commentators

48 Rodolfo Torres and Christopher Kyriakides, Race Defaced: Paradigms of Pessimism, Politics of Possibility (Stanford University Press, 2012), 119.

49 Mark Lilla, “Opinion | The End of Identity Liberalism,” accessed March 20, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-identity-liberalism.html. The argument is expanded in Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics (HarperCollins, 2017).

50 Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New Press, The, 2016). See also, indicatively, Justin Gest, The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality (Oxford University Press, 2016); David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics (Oxford University Press, 2017); Lisa Mckenzie, “‘It’s Not Ideal’: Reconsidering ‘anger’ and ‘apathy’ in the Brexit Vote among an Invisible Working Class:,” Competition & Change, April 13, 2017, https://doi.org/10.1177/1024529417704134; Wolfgang Streeck, “Trump and the Trumpists,” Inference: International Review of Science, accessed March 21, 2018, http://inference-review.com/article/trump-and-the-trumpists; Joan C. Williams, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America (Harvard Business Press, 2017); Robert Wuthnow, The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America (Princeton University Press, 2018).

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have shown: indeed, the vote to leave the European Union was delivered by the

propertied, pensioned, well-off, white middle class based in southern England, and not

the working class in the North51; similarly, the swing to Trump was predominantly

carried by the white middle class, and not the white working class.52 In attributing Brexit

and the Trump vote to the white working class, this widespread narrative not only

contradicts the available empirical evidence. By scapegoating minorities—women,

Blacks, immigrants, refugees, etc.—it also suggests that class and race (and gender and

sexuality) are distinct and separate, and thus need to be ranked in order of importance.

As Frederick Douglass once argued, to insist on such divisions is to overlook that it is in

the interest of capital to pit white workers against black workers; “The slaveholders, by

encouraging the enmity of the poor laboring white man against the blacks, succeeded in

making the said white man almost as much of a slave as the black himself.” In fact,

“both are plundered by the same plunderer.”53

Taking issue with this narrative of the “left behind”, this thesis argues that it is a

mistake to separate anti-capitalist politics from the struggle against white supremacy,

51 “Brexit: The Decision of a Divided Country,” Danny Dorling - 丹尼·道灵 (blog), July 7, 2016, http://www.dannydorling.org/?page_id=5564.

52 Pew Research Center, “On Views of Race and Inequality, Blacks and Whites Are Worlds Apart,” Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends Project (blog), June 27, 2016, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/06/27/on-views-of-race-and-inequality-blacks-and-whites-are-worlds-apart/. Similarly, the idea that economic decline has uniquely affected whites is not born out by the data. In the United States, the unemployment rate of Blacks is nearly twice that of Hispanics and more than double that of whites. See David Roediger, “Who’s Afraid of the White Working Class?: On Joan C. Williams’s ‘White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America,’” Los Angeles Review of Books, accessed November 26, 2017, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/whos-afraid-of-the-white-working-class-on-joan-c-williamss-white-working-class-overcoming-class-cluelessness-in-america/. See also Gurminder K. Bhambra, “Brexit, Trump, and ‘Methodological Whiteness’: On the Misrecognition of Race and Class,” The British Journal of Sociology 68 Suppl 1 (November 2017): S214–32, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12317; Robbie Shilliam, “Beware of Those Who Use ‘the People’ to Drive through Brexit,” The Policy Space (blog), April 11, 2017, http://www.thepolicyspace.com.au/2017/11/182-beware-of-those-who-use-the-people-to-drive-through-brexit.

53 Quoted in Ahmed Shawki, Black Liberation and Socialism (Haymarket Books, 2005), 46. Writing in 1870, Marx arrived at a similar conclusion: “Every industrial and commercial center in England possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he feels himself a member of the ruling nation and so turns himself into a tool of the aristocrats and capitalists of his country against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude is much the same as that of the 'poor whites' to the 'niggers' in the former slave states of the USA. The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker at once the accomplice and stupid tool of the English rule in Ireland. This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organization. It is the secret by which the capitalist maintains its power. And that class is fully aware of it.” See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto: A Road Map to History’s Most Important Political Document (Haymarket Books, 2005), 164.

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patriarchy, settler colonialism, and empire. A materialist reading of the global colour

line uncovers the political possibilities that are inhibited by theoretical frameworks and

political elites that insist on a neat separation between “race” and “class.” Race-making

practices are fundamental (not epiphenomenal) to the operation of capital, because

racism supplies the precarious and exploitable lives capitalism needs to extract land and

labour. Consequently, where hegemonic narratives imply that countering right-wing

populism necessitates a privileging of the needs of the white working class, a focus on

racial capitalism reveals that there can be no politics of class that is not already

racialized. As Robbie Shilliam has recently argued, “this blunt demographic sensibility

entirely obscures the operation of power, which is always to cut the social fabric at its

weakest, i.e. through the bodies of those racialized, gendered and nationalized as

undeserving.”54 Rather than separating race and class—which post-Brexit and post-

Trump commentary insists that we should—a materialist reading of the global colour

line thus points towards the necessity of weaving together anti-racist, anti-sexist, and

anti-capitalist critique. A focus on race (and gender) need not detract attention from

questions of class: quite the opposite, a truly anti-capitalist politics has to be anti-racist,

anti-sexist, and internationalist.

These are not novel insights—forgotten, perhaps, but they are not new. Stuart

Hall and the wider collective at the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural

Studies had already in the late 1970s began to understand race as “the modality in

which class is lived” and “the medium in which class relations are experienced.”55

Previous generations of radicals and revolutionaries—from the Black feminism of the

Combahee River Collective to the Black Panther Party, the strikers at Grunwick, and

Third World anti-imperial internationalism—similarly recognised these linkages, and

thus imagined themselves as part of a larger community of resistance. As Malcolm X

declared in a 1962 speech, “The same rebellion, the same impatience, the same anger

that exists in the hearts of the dark people in Africa and Asia is existing in the hearts and

minds of 20 million black people in this country who have been just as thoroughly

54 Robbie Shilliam, “Race and the Undeserving Poor,” The Disorder of Things (blog), 2018, https://thedisorderofthings.com/2018/06/27/race-and-the-undeserving-poor/. Reading historical class formation through the lens of empire, Shilliam argues that “The 'white working class' is not a natural or neutral category of political economy. As a constituency, the 'white working class' has rarely been self-authored, self-empowered or self-directed. This constituency must be apprehended principally as an elite artefact of political domination.” See also the excellent book Robbie Shilliam, Race and the Undeserving Poor: From Abolition to Brexit (Agenda Publishing, 2018).

55 Stuart Hall, “Race, Articulation, and Socities Structured in Dominance,” in Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, ed. Houston A. Baker Jr, Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg (University of Chicago Press, 1996), 55.

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colonized as the people in Africa and Asia.”56 For many of these radicals, capitalism,

racism, (settler) colonialism, and patriarchy had to be understood within a shared circuit

and thus resisted simultaneously: as the women of Combahee explained, “the liberation

of all peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of

capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy.”57

Such solidarities are not a thing of the past, but are indeed still in the making.

From the streets of Ferguson and Baltimore to the dark waters of the Mediterranean, to

the refugee camps of Gaza and the West Bank, and the townships of Cape Town, they

are being re-enacted by a new generation of activists. By linking together seemingly

disparate spaces and histories of revolutionary struggles, these groups and movement

help us envision what emancipatory politics might look like in these dark times, when

established media and right-wing demagogues remain committed to distinguishing

between the interests of “material” class and “ideational” race. Marx understood the

goal of critical theory as the “self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age.”58

This thesis is written with that spirit in mind.

Chapter Outline

This thesis unfolds in three parts and eight chapters. The first part interrogates

how, why, and with what effect questions of race and colonialism remain absent from

cosmopolitan discussions of global justice and solidarity. The second part explores how

it might be possible to stitch these “unspeakable things unspoken” back into the fabric

of internationalism. Finally, the third and final section offers a detailed reading of a set

of movements, groups, and activists that practice a different form of global solidarity: a

revolutionary political solidarity that links together seemingly disparate spaces and

histories of struggles—including the migrant crisis in Europe, the movement for Black

lives in the United States, the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and

the struggle for decolonisation in South Africa. Studying these movements opens up

space for imagining what solidarity and emancipatory politics might look beyond the

colour line.

56 Quoted on the cover of Sohail Daulatzai, Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom Beyond America (U of Minnesota Press, 2012).

57 The Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” 1977, https://americanstudies.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Keyword%20Coalition_Readings.pdf.

58 Cited in Nancy Fraser, “What’s Critical about Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender,” New German Critique, no. 35 (1985): 97, https://doi.org/10.2307/488202.

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Chapter 1, “Cosmopolitanism and the Colonial Life of Ethics”, offers a detailed

analysis and critique of cosmopolitan approaches to international solidarity. It

demonstrates that liberal as well as critical conceptualisations reproduce and legitimise

the racial structuring of world politics. Seeking to derive an apolitical understanding of

solidarity, cosmopolitan thinkers often privilege ontological reflection above and before

analysis of historical relations. This substitutes abstract humanity for historical

humanity, and ultimately transforms the responsible colonial agent into an innocent

bystander. The result is a discourse of hospitality, generosity, humanitarianism, and

empathy rather than accountability, guilt, restitution, repentance, and structural reform.

Chapter 2, “From Revolution to Ethics: Historicizing the Cosmopolitan Turn”,

interrogates the historical, political, and conceptual conditions of possibility of the turn

to cosmopolitan political theory and ethics. The rise of cosmopolitan thinking in the

1990s is less a result of a steady, gradual climb towards global justice, and more a

product of a set of historical and material conditions which in the late 20 th century made

it highly desirable for policymakers, activists, and intellectuals to think of world politics

as an ethical space. A historicization of the cosmopolitan project not only calls into

question the ethics/politics distinction on which it is based. In revealing

cosmopolitanism as a historically produced discourse—anchored in particular material

interests and relations of power—it also demonstrates that the cosmopolitan preference

for abstraction, ahistoricism, and anti-politics is an eminently political strategy which

helps to uphold, legitimise, and entrench the current unjust and unequal racialized

international order.

Chapter 3, “The Political Economy of Race: Rethinking the Global Colour

Line”, takes up the task of radicalising and decolonising solidarity. Drawing on Cedric

Robinson's 1983 magnum opus Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical

Tradition, I argue that this necessitates that the global colour line be rethought through a

materialist lens. In contrast to (postcolonial) scholarship that focuses on questions of

Eurocentrism, representation, and cultural difference, such an approach centre-stages the

global political economy of race and racism. Unwaged and less-than-free labour—such

as chattel slavery, racialized indentured servitude, convict leasing, debt peonage, and

gendered forms of caring work and reproductive labour—are not just incidental to

capital accumulation, but fundamental to its operations.

Chapter 4, “Identity Politics and the Class Struggle: Towards a New

Internationalism”, builds on this to argue that a materialist reading of the global colour

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line, and a consequent focus on interlocking forms of oppressions under racial

capitalism, opens up space for a different kind of internationalism and politics of

solidarity: a revolutionary solidarity based on the intersectionality of freedom struggles,

rather than on abstract notions of what it means to be human.

Chapters 5, 6, and 7 explore what such a solidarity looks like in practice. Chapter

5, “The Drowned and the Saved: Circuits of Resistance in the Black Mediterranean”,

explores the links between racial capitalism, imperialism, (neo)colonial dispossession,

and migration. Focusing on Black Lives Matter UK and Parti des Indigènes de la

République, it examines how some activist groups rupture hegemonic discourses of

Western benevolence towards migrants by connecting the mass deaths of migrants

during crossings of the Mediterranean to anti-racist struggles within Europe. By place

the ongoing migrant crisis within a broader analysis of empire, capitalism, labour

exploitation, and neocolonialism, these groups open up space for new forms of

solidarity: for an internationalism that subverts the national “we” and that brings

together migrants, refugees, workers, and European minorities (Blacks, Muslims,

women, Roma, Sami, and so on) in a shared struggle.

Chapter 6, “#Palestine2Ferguson: Empire and the Global Security Archipelago”,

focuses on recent forms of Black-Palestinian solidarity. Where liberal commentators in

recent years have approached Black Lives Matter as a domestic US movement

struggling for access and reform—and thus, for a more inclusive American dream—I

argue that the violence inflicted on Black people within the United States is intimately

linked to the racial terror imposed on Brown and Black people globally. Focusing on

campaigns such as “When I See Them I See Us” and #FreeAhed, I examine how Black-

Palestinian activists unravel these links by insisting that the militarisation and neoliberal

governance of urban Black America and Palestinian communities must be viewed

within a shared circuit.

Chapter 7, “Things Fall Apart: Contesting Settler Colonialism, in South Africa

and Beyond”, deepens this analysis of entangled geographies of resistance by putting

settler colonial studies into conversation with the literature on racial capitalism.

Focusing on the Fallist and BDS movements, I argue that racialized dispossession is a

constant feature of capital accumulation. While South Africa now is “free” in the legal

sense of the term, the marginalisation and exploitation of the Black poor have in fact

intensified since the transition to democracy. The South African experience thus heeds a

warning to other groups and movements struggling against (settler) colonialism,

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including BDS.

Chapter 8, “Universal History Without Guarantees”, brings these arguments

together by showing how the groups and movements discussed in previous chapters

help us disentangle emancipatory politics from its historical baggage of Eurocentrism,

racism, and empire. If the global struggle against racial capitalism is a universalist

project, then how can it avoid relying on the “master's tools” and repeating the moral-

political universalism it supposedly wants to challenge? To answer this question—and,

thus, to show how it might be possible to retrieve the notion of universal history and

total critique, without invoking Eurocentric ideas of progress and teleology—this

chapter draws on Susan Buck-Morss's re-reading of Hegelian dialectics and Stuart Hall's

call for a Marxism “without guarantees.”

The conclusion, “Strikers in Saris: Poetry of the Future”, summarises the argument

and contributions of the thesis through a discussion of the migrant women led strike at

Grunwick in North London, 1976-8. In our contemporary era of Trump, Brexit, global

sweatshops, mass migration, environmental catastrophes, #metoo, racialized police

violence, and global fascist resurgence—where “white workers” frequently are

juxtaposed with “immigrants”, and identity politics is blamed for the demise of the

organised Left—revisiting these “strikers in saris” opens up space for imagining

solidarity and emancipatory politics anew.

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C H A P T E R 1

Cosmopolitanism and the Colonial Life of Ethics

“For those who rule, ethics needs to precede politics since they presuppose an already just and humane, although often hidden, environment as the de facto

context of their inquiry into what ought to be. For those who are oppressed, they regard the appeal to ethics as begging the question of the relevance of good will

and argue for the need to shift the conditions of rule, to engage in politics, before addressing an ethics.”

—Lewis Gordon1

Introduction

“My Dear Sir, I have received your declaration of human rights and want to say frankly that I am greatly disappointed... Under paragraph five you appeal for sympathy for persons driven from the land of their birth; but how about American Negroes, Africans, and Indians who have not been driven from their land of birth but are nonetheless deprived of their rights? Under paragraph six you want redress for those who wander the earth but how about those who do not wander and nevertheless are deprived of their fundamental human rights?... In other words, this declaration of rights has apparently no thought of the rights of Negroes, Indians, and South Sea Islanders. Why then call it the Declaration of Human Rights?”2

These words were written by W.E.B. Du Bois in his 1944 response to the

American Jewish Committee's proposal for a “Declaration of Human Rights.” The

Declaration, he argued, was framed in the language of universal humanity but in

actuality reproduced the existing racial ordering of world politics. While Du Bois was a

staunch critic of anti-Semitism, he worried that the effort to enshrine human rights in

international law proceeded without confronting empire and the global colour line. A

year later he submitted his own proposal to the founding conference of the United

Nations in San Francisco, stating that the “first statute of international law” should read:

“The colonial system of government, however deeply rooted in history and custom, is

today undemocratic, socially dangerous and a main cause of wars.”3 As it turned out, his

proposal never made it to the UN floor.

1 Lewis R. Gordon, An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2008), 88.2 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois (Univ of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 24.3 Du Bois, 11.

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This chapter offers a detailed analysis and critique of cosmopolitan approaches

to international solidarity. In recent decades cosmopolitanism has rapidly become a

topic of central concern within the scholarly community, in general, and the discipline

of IR, in particular.4 In suggesting that we think of ourselves as global citizens—as a

band of brothers and sisters united by our common humanity—cosmopolitanism is

frequently presented as a cure for the worst forms of parochialism and nationalism. In

Ulrich Beck's enthusiastic formulation, “citizens of the world, unite!”5 Through its focus

on human rights, humanitarianism, and international law, cosmopolitanism brings the

question of international solidarity into sharp focus. By calling for solidarity with those

around the world subjected to violence, oppression, and human rights abuse,

cosmopolitan approaches might give the appearance of constituting an emancipatory

political project. Nonetheless, and as Du Bois made clear in his 1944 critique of human

rights, appeals to common humanity frequently perform an ideological function. In this

chapter I argue that cosmopolitan calls for international solidarity obfuscate how the

modern world system was founded on, and continues as, a hierarchical racial order. In

framing the problem as one of how to shift from solidarity among “friends” to solidarity

with “strangers”, these approaches not only rely on a particular reading of present

relations that renders invisible the many afterlives of historical and ongoing colonialism;

they also obscure how modern understandings of solidarity themselves evolved in the

context of European empire-building. By disconnecting connected histories, these

perspectives ultimately contribute to an ideological formation that removes from view

the global history of empire, colonialism, and transatlantic slavery. In that they turn

questions of accountability, guilt, restitution, repentance, and structural reform, into

matters of hospitality, generosity, humanitarianism, and empathy.

The chapter develops this argument in four sections. The first section focuses on

liberal cosmopolitanism: I argue that the liberal “practical project of an egalitarian and

self-determined solidarity with strangers”6 is premised on a wilful amnesia that

4 See, indicatively, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, Reprint edition (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007); Daniele Archibugi, “The Global Commonwealth of Citizens: Toward Cosmopolitan Democracy,” Princeton University Press, 2008, http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8737.html; Seyla Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism (Oxford University Press, 2008); Richard Beardsworth, Cosmopolitanism and International Relations Theory (John Wiley & Sons, 2013); Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (Routledge, 2003); Toni Erskine, Embedded Cosmopolitanism: Duties to Strangers and Enemies in a World of “Dislocated Communities” (Published for The British Academy by Oxford University Press, 2008); David Held, Cosmopolitanism: Ideals and Realities (Polity, 2010).

5 Quoted in Archibugi, “The Global Commonwealth of Citizens: Toward Cosmopolitan Democracy,” 134.

6 Hauke Brunkhorst, Solidarity: From Civic Friendship To A Global Legal Community (MIT Press,

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disavows the long history of empire and through that assists in the ongoing

consolidation of Western hegemony. More controversially, I suggest that this also holds

true for those cosmopolitans, such as Thomas Pogge, who arguably do take these

aspects very seriously. The second section turns to critical and poststructuralist attempts

to rethink solidarity through notions of bodily vulnerability, grief, suffering, pain, loss,

and trauma. While these approaches aim to take seriously the silences and exclusions of

liberal cosmopolitanism, my analysis shows that they take up the struggle against pain,

suffering, and vulnerability without engaging the structures and histories of racial

violence that produce these conditions. In the third section I turn to recent attempts

within postcolonial theory to derive a rooted, vernacular, and subaltern

cosmopolitanism. While these perspectives are highly critical of liberal top-down

approaches, I show that they do not so much challenge as supplement them by providing

a description of how cosmopolitan sentiments might come into being from below. More

problematically, by focusing on questions of cultural identity, Eurocentrism, and

representation, these approaches often sideline global structural inequalities and the

critique of political economy. By conceiving of colonialism in purely civilisational

terms, and Eurocentrism as a mainly cultural force, postcolonial formulations of

cosmopolitanism actually help mystify the materiality of the global colour line. The

final section ties these argument together by arguing that cosmopolitan solidarity

constitutes a “swindle.” The problem with cosmopolitan approaches is not only that they

fail to take seriously the racial ordering of world politics: more problematically, they are

themselves underpinned by a particular racial logic—based on the desire to protect and

offer political resistance for endangered others—which makes it possible for the white

Western subject to re-constitute itself as “ethical” and “good”, innocent of its imperialist

histories and present complicities.

Can Solidarity Save Strangers? Liberalism and Empire

Liberal cosmopolitan understandings of solidarity revolve around notions of

human rights, international law, universal citizenship, and democracy. Grounded in an

ontology centred on the universal, rational, and sovereign subject, liberal

cosmopolitanism understands the individual human being as the ultimate object of

moral concern in world politics. As Vivienne Jabri explains, for liberal cosmopolitans

2005), 76.

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“the realm of the international, a location defined in terms of sovereign statehood, is

somehow reined in, challenged, by another realm, that of the human.”7 Tracing its

lineage to the Cynics and the Stoics and, in particular, to Kant's project of perpetual

peace, liberal cosmopolitan approaches typically regard solidarity as an expression of an

underlying human essence. Applied to the international, this is taken to imply that it is

morally arbitrary to accord “citizens” a higher priority than “strangers.” Variations of

this theme can be found in the deontological, utilitarian as well as contractarian models

of cosmopolitanism developed by Charles Beitz, Brian Barry, Thomas Pogge, Martha

Nussbaum, Peter Singer, and Simon Caney, amongst others.8 It also informs English

School solidarists such as Nicholas Wheeler and Jean-Marc Coicaud, for whom

international solidarity is based on the idea that

“whilst human beings live in a plurality of cultures, which exhibit a range of particular moral practices, all have basic needs and rights that have to be respected. These basic needs and rights, constituting the core commonality of individuals across the world, are also what bring them together and impel them to identify with, and care about, each other’s suffering. Violation of these needs and rights calls for a sense of international solidarity. Failing to respond to the plight of the other, failing to show solidarity, diminishes the humanity of all. As such, international solidarity points to the international community’s responsibility and obligation toward victims of conflict regardless of their personal circumstances and geographical location. This is how the idea and practice of international humanitarian intervention can be viewed as one expressing an ethics of international solidarity.”9

For Wheeler and Coicaud, international solidarity is intrinsically linked to the spread of

the “culture of human rights” which, they argue, makes it possible for citizens to

imagine themselves in other people's situation; indeed, “the universalization of human

rights is a real articulation of international solidarity as exercised in favor of

7 Vivienne Jabri, “Solidarity and Spheres of Culture: The Cosmopolitan and the Postcolonial,” Review of International Studies 33, no. 4 (2007): 715, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210507007747.

8 See Charles R. Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations, Revised edition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999); Brian Barry, Justice as Impartiality (Oxford England: Clarendon Press ; New York, 1996); Simon Caney, Justice Beyond Borders: A Global Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Thomas W. Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms, First Edition edition (Cambridge ; Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2002); Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 1, no. 3 (April 1, 1972): 229–43.

9 Jean-Marc Coicaud and Nicholas J. Wheeler, National Interest and International Solidarity: Particular and Universal Ethics in International Life (New York: United Nations University Press, 2008), 3.

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individuals.”10

Another set of liberal cosmopolitans conceive of international solidarity, not as

an expression of an underlying human essence, but an offshoot of new forms of global

governance. Pointing to the process of globalisation, the growth of transnational

linkages and international communications, and the global nature of climate change,

thinkers such as Danielle Archibugi, Ulrich Beck, Hauke Brunkhorst, David Held,

Jürgen Habermas, and Andrew Linklater advocate for the creation of new forms of

cosmopolitan democracy. For thinkers such as Held and Archibugi, this entails the

creation of an international order based on the principles of liberal democracy and law.11

Others, such as Habermas, adopt a thinner conception of cosmopolitanism premised on

the democratic process of establishing law. While some of these thinkers distance

themselves from classic appeals to human essence and common humanity, they agree

that the ideal of cosmopolitan solidarity is intrinsically linked to the spread of human

rights. As Brunkhorst explains, since the French revolution the “normative horizon of

the citizen is that of the global citizen” and therefore everyone as a global citizen has the

moral duty to realise “[t]he practical project of an egalitarian and self-determined

solidarity with strangers.”12 Cosmopolitan solidarity, he maintains, will unfold as part of

the Enlightenment project of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Until such institutions are

in place, cosmopolitan solidarity will have “to support itself on the moral universalism

of human rights alone.”13

For all these liberal cosmopolitans, the problem at hand is that solidarity

traditionally has been confined to the territorial nation-state. Viewed from this

perspective, the challenge is precisely one of how to extend solidarity beyond the citizen

rights of particular nation-states to include a “human-rights patriotism.”14 As Fukuyi

Kurasawa explains, this is why liberal cosmopolitans promote an understanding of

solidarity according to which the latter consists of “a process of trickle-down integration

of the world's citizens through their adherence to a common political culture composed

of universal principles (participatory democracy, human rights, etc.) entrenched in

international law and global institutions.”15 Nonetheless, in framing the problem in

10 Coicaud and Wheeler, 4.11 Archibugi, “The Global Commonwealth of Citizens: Toward Cosmopolitan Democracy”; Held,

Cosmopolitanism.12 Brunkhorst, Solidarity, 76.13 Jürgen Habermas, The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays (John Wiley & Sons, 2015), 108.14 Brunkhorst, Solidarity, 8.15 Fuyuki Kurasawa, “A Cosmopolitanism from Below: Alternative Globalization and the Creation of a

Solidarity without Bounds,” European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie 45,

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terms of how to shift from solidarity among “friends” to solidarity with “strangers”,

these thinkers both rely on and reproduce a particular (Eurocentric, colonial) reading of

history. As scholars working within the post- and decolonial tradition have shown, the

world has long been a space of “imperial globality” in which historical trajectories have

been intertwined through power relations.16 In Frantz Fanon's famous formulation,

“In a very concrete way Europe has stuffed itself inordinately with the gold and raw materials of the colonial countries: Latin America, China and Africa. From all these continents, under whose eyes Europe today raises up her tower of opulence, there has flowed out for centuries diamonds and oil, silk and cotton, wood and exotic products. Europe is literally the creation of the Third World. The wealth which smothers her is that which was stolen from under-developed peoples. The ports of Holland, the docks of Bordeaux and Liverpool were specialised in the Negro slave-trade, and owe their renown to millions of deported slaves.”17

In a recent book Lisa Lowe follows Fanon in documenting how the coeval global

processes of settler colonialism, transatlantic slave trade, and indentured labour were the

very conditions of possibility “for British and American national formations for liberty,

liberal personhood, society, and government at the end of the eighteenth and the

beginning of the nineteenth centuries.”18 While modernity typically is understood as a

mainly European phenomenon—as a product of the European Renaissance and

Enlightenment—in reality Europe's economic and political ascendancy would not have

been possible without the establishment of interrelated systems of domination over the

peoples of the Americas, Africa, and Asia.19 As Lowe makes clear, European modernity

cannot be disentangled from the histories of dispossession, colonialism, and

enslavement: in Aimé Césaire's famous formulation, there is no “civilization and

colonization”, but they are rather one and the same.20

no. 2 (August 2004): 234, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003975604001444.16 Julian Go and George Lawson, Global Historical Sociology (Cambridge University Press, 2017), 3.

See also Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (NYU Press, 2000); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton University Press, 2000); W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (Cosimo, Inc., 2007); Enrique D. Dussel, The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of “The Other” and the Myth of Modernity (Continuum International Publishing Group, Limited, 1995); Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 2007); Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (University of Chicago Press, 1999).

17 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 2007, 59.18 Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Duke University Press, 2015), 21.19 See Enrique Dussel, “Eurocentrism and Modernity (Introduction to the Frankfurt Lectures),”

Boundary 2 20, no. 3 (1993): 65–76, https://doi.org/10.2307/303341.20 Aimé Césaire, “Discourse on Colonialism,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A

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By relying on methodological nationalist accounts that bracket the

“international” and the “external”, liberal cosmopolitans thus obfuscate that the modern

concept of solidarity evolved in a context characterised, not only by urbanisation,

secularisation, and the development of the modern state, but also and crucially by

European empire-building.21 Indeed, while modern understandings of solidarity “are

associated with coming to be on the side of angels”,22 as David Roediger has argued, the

origins of the term “are surprisingly entwined with impulses that, if not conservative,

are seemingly at odds with the left uses of the word so common today.”23 As it evolved

in the 18th and 19th century, the concept of solidarity is closely linked to the Christian

concept of caritas with its emphasis on compassion for the poor, the dispossessed, and

the wounded.24 This is an abstract, universal, and apolitical understanding of solidarity, a

solidarity that embraces all Christians and, in its aspirations, all of humankind. As

Ruben Gaztambide-Fernandez explains, this “implicates notions of solidarity as part of

the justification for religious conversion as a central strategy for colonisation.”25 Authors

such as Michael Barnett and David Rieff have charted the relationship between

colonialism and international solidarity (in its Christian as well as

secularised/humanitarian version). From la mission civilisatrice to the white man's

burden and manifest destiny, colonialism was frequently construed as a charitable and

solidaristic mission aiming to rescue backward races from disease, destitution, and

depravity.26 As Barnett makes clear, the “commitment to helping distant strangers and

deepening new forms of transnational solidarity”27 was an integral aspect of the colonial

Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (Routledge, 2015), 172.21 There are some notable exceptions to this trend; Thomas Pogge, perhaps most famously, includes the

history of empire and colonialism as part of his argument for global economic redistribution and institutional reform. Yet as I discuss in more detail in the following pages, Pogge treats this history as a deviation from the key premises of liberalism, and not as something that is constitutive of liberal assumptions about rationality and history.

22 David Roediger, “Making Solidarity Uneasy: Cautions on a Keyword from Black Lives Matter to the Past,” American Quarterly 68, no. 2 (June 28, 2016): 225, https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2016.0033.

23 Roediger, 229.24 See Brunkhorst, Solidarity; Michael Hoelzl, “Recognizing the Sacrificial Victim: The Problem of

Solidarity for Critical Social Theory,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Studies 6 (2004); Steinar. Stjernø, Solidarity in Europe: The History of an Idea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511490378.

25 Rubén A. Gaztambide-Fernández, “Decolonization and the Pedagogy of Solidarity,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (September 8, 2012): 47, http://decolonization.org/index.php/des/article/download/18633.

26 See Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Cornell University Press, 2011); David Rieff, A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis (Random House, 2002).

27 Barnett, Empire of Humanity, 55. Anthony Pagden and Craig Calhoun have similarly pointed to the difficulty of disentangling cosmopolitanism from the history of European universalism and its civilizing mission, see Craig Calhoun, “The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travellers: Towards a Critique of Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism,” in Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context and Practice, ed. Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen (Oxford University Press, 2002); Anthony

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enterprise. Walter Crane's monumental “Imperial Federation Map Showing the Extent of

the British Empire”, produced in 1886, captures this link between empire and solidarity.

Filled with orientalist imagery, exotic animals, and racial stereotypes, the map is

crowned by three banners proclaiming the promise of empire: “Freedom”, “Federation”,

and—indeed—“Fraternity”, the older word for solidarity.28 Historically the concept of

solidarity might thus have done “more for the enforcement of colonial orders than for

decolonisation.”29

Fig. 1: Walter Crane—Imperial Federation Map Showing the Extent of the British Empire in 1886

The historical imbrication of solidarity with colonialism should make us cautious

about the ways in which cosmopolitan theorists use and understand the concept today.

Indeed, as Pierluigi Musarò has argued, contemporary liberal articulations of solidarity

continue to be premised on a “religious-salvational narrative of rescue”, based on “the

Pagden, The Burdens of Empire: 1539 to the Present (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

28 David Roediger discusses Crane's map in detail in Roediger, “Making Solidarity Uneasy,” 234.29 Gaztambide-Fernández, “Decolonization and the Pedagogy of Solidarity.” See also David Roediger's

presidential address from ASA 2015, published as Roediger, “Making Solidarity Uneasy.”

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noblesse oblige of the powerful (rights holders) toward the powerless (those who cannot

enact their human rights on their own).”30 Such understandings are ultimately premised

on a certain dislocation from history: it is only by removing from view the long history

of empire, transatlantic slavery, and colonial conquest that thinkers such as Brunkhorst,

Habermas, and Wheeler are able to formulate the problem of cosmopolitan solidarity as

one of how to shift from solidarity among “friends” to solidarity with “strangers.”

The effects of this erasure is clearly visible in contemporary debates about

humanitarian intervention and the responsibility to protect (R2P). At a base level, these

discussions revolve around the question if, and at what point, the international

community should intervene to stop human rights violation perpetrated by states against

their populations. What, in other words, are our responsibilities towards those who are

not our fellow citizens? As Anne Orford has argued, these debates take for granted that

the people we are concerned to help are “strangers” and, hence, that the choice facing

the international community is one between (military) action and inaction, presence and

absence. As Orford makes clear, these debates are underpinned by a deeply racialized

and gendered “imaginative geography... according to which the international community

is absent from the scene of violence and suffering until it intervenes as a heroic

saviour.”31 Such imaginative geographies sanction the idea that humanitarian crises are

inherently “local”, and the exclusive result of homegrown ethnic hatreds and age-old

animosities. This obscures the systemic and structural violence that often is complicit in

creating the conditions that lead to humanitarian crises. As Robert Meister has argued,

this means that the R2P and human rights can oppose genocide, but not the global

structures that make such violence possible; indeed, “[a] perverse effect of a globalized

'ethic' of protecting local human rights is to take the global causes of human suffering

off the political agenda.”32 For some, including French philosopher Alain Badiou, this is

why the liberal paradigm of human rights and humanitarian intervention must be

considered the very foundations of imperialism: indeed,

30 Pierluigi Musarò, “The Banality of Goodness: Humanitarianism between the Ethics of Showing and the Ethics of Seeing,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 6, no. 2 (July 23, 2015): 318, https://doi.org/10.1353/hum.2015.0018.

31 Anne Orford, Reading Humanitarian Intervention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 85.

32 Robert Meister, After Evil : A Politics of Human Rights (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 47. For an account of how human rights focus on preventing cruelty and violence in their specific and physical form foremost, rather than the structural violence and social deprivation that make it possible, see also David Campbell, National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity and Justice in Bosnia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1998); Jenny Edkins, Whose Hunger? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Randall Williams, The Divided World: Human Rights and Its Violence (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

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“Who can fail to see that un our humanitarian expeditions, interventions, embarkations of charitable légionnaires, the Subject presumed to be universal is split? On the side of the victims, the haggard animal exposed on television screens. On the side of the benefactors, conscience and the imperative to intervene. Any why does this splitting always assign the same roles to the same sides? Who cannot see that this ethics which rests on the misery of the world hides, behind its victim-Man, the good-Man, the white-Man?”33

The liberal self-congratulatory discourse on moral responsibility, Badiou argues,

ultimately amounts to little more than a “sordid self-satisfaction in the 'West', with the

insistent argument according to which the misery of the Third World is the result of its

own incompetence, its own inanity—in short, its own subhumanity.”34

There now exists a well-established feminist, poststructuralist, and

post/decolonial literature that critically interrogates the ways in which liberal

cosmopolitanism assists in the consolidation of Western hegemony. By calling into

question the assumptions about humanity that underlie liberal cosmopolitanism, these

critics have demonstrated that the rational sovereign subject must be understood as a

reflection of parochial, historically specific values and experiences—typically those of

the well-off citizen; a heterosexual, white, urban male. As Enrique Dussel has shown,

René Descartes' dictum “I think, therefore I am”—the epitome of the liberal ontology of

the sovereign subject—is in fact preceded by 150 years of “I conquer, therefore I am.”35

Descartes formulated his philosophy in Amsterdam at the very moment in the mid-17th

century when Holland occupied the core of the world-system. The idolatrous

universalism of Cartesian philosophy—which claims to be able to speak from a zero-

point, possessing a perspective equivalent to God's Eye—thus arises from a subject

whose geopolitical location is determined by its existence as a colonizer/conqueror. The

Cartesian subject, Dussel argues, is in fact the Imperial Being: in actual history, the ego

cogito is not simply the homo sapiens but the conqueror. In other words, while liberal

cosmopolitanism claims to speak from a neutral and universal perspective, in actuality it

reflects parochial interests cloaked in the moral imperative to save other, distant

populations. Although liberal cosmopolitanism might give the appearance of

contributing to an emancipatory political project that extends solidarity to the poor, the

33 Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (Verso, 2002), 12–13.34 Badiou, 13.35 Dussel, The Invention of the Americas.

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vulnerable, and the downtrodden, as Jabri makes clear, in reality it is “a project

complicit in the perpetuation of structures of domination generative of the very

conditions which are then framed in a discursive politics of human solidarity.”36

The are, of course, notable exceptions to this way of framing the problem of

solidarity: indeed, it would be misleading to characterise all liberal cosmopolitans as

apologists of empire. Thinkers such as Thomas Pogge have arguably been amongst the

fiercest critics of Western (neo)colonialism. Pointing to the colonial origins of Third

World poverty, Pogge argues that existing inequality is “deeply tainted by how it

accumulated over the course of one historical process... that was deeply pervaded by

enslavement, colonialism, even genocide.”37 Members of affluent countries not only

continue to benefit from these past injustices, but are also actively involved in

sustaining Third World poverty by virtue of upholding a harmful global economic order

that directly violate the rights of the poor. Because of this they have a moral duty to

eliminate poverty—something that, Pogge argues, could be achieved by reforming the

international institutions that continue to reproduce poverty.

Despite his critique of colonialism and the role that international institutions play

in reproducing global inequalities, there are however a number of problems with

Pogge's argument. Throughout his work Pogge has continued to regard the “basic

structure” as distinct from white supremacy (and patriarchy).38 As Charles Mills points

out, white supremacy is for Pogge a deviation “from a flawed but basically sound

institutional architecture” rather than “constitutive of that architecture itself.”39 That is,

while Pogge does refer to colonialism as an unjust planetary institution “based upon

racial superiority”, he ultimately does not think meaningful global justice requires a

more fundamental modification of the world order: indeed, poverty can be eradicated

through “minor modifications of the global economic and political order.” Rather than

unraveling the complicity of liberalism with empire and colonialism, Pogge ultimately

treats them as exceptions to an otherwise peaceful norm: while the history of

36 Jabri, “Solidarity and Spheres of Culture,” 724.37 Thomas Pogge, “Severe Poverty As A Human Rights Violation,” in Freedom from Poverty as a

Human Right: Who Owes What to the Very Poor?, ed. Thomas Pogge (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, 2007), 31. See also Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, 2002; Thomas W. Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights (Polity, 2008).

38 Following Rawls, Pogge understands the “basic structure” as the “primary subject of justice”: it “'comprises the main social institutions—the constitution, the economic regime, the legal order and its specification of property,' the family in some form, and how these institutions cohere into one unified system of social cooperation.” Thomas W. Pogge, John Rawls: His Life and Theory of Justice (Oxford University Press, 2007), 29.

39 Charles W. Mills, “Realizing (Through Radicalizing) Pogge,” in Thomas Pogge and His Critics, ed. Alison Jaggar (Polity, 2010), 153.

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colonialism, transatlantic slavery, and Indigenous genocide are appalling and should be

condemned, for Pogge this does not necessitate a rethinking of liberalism. This is in

contrast to a growing literature on liberal visions of empire, spearheaded by scholars

such as Duncan Bell, Uday Singh Mehta, and Jennifer Pitts. As these thinkers make

clear, far from contradicting the key tenets of liberalism, empire and colonialism

actually stem from deeply liberal assumptions about rationality and historical progress.40

Responding to this critique in recent years a variety of critical, feminist, and

poststructuralist thinkers have sought to derive an alternative conceptualisation of

solidarity that goes beyond the pitfalls of liberalism. These thinkers argue for a new

humanism based, not on the rationalist sovereign subject central to liberal political

theory, but on notions of loss, grief, relationality, and bodily vulnerability. Nonetheless,

and as we shall see in the next section, they frequently end up reproducing the

underlying assumptions of the liberal cosmopolitan solidarity they seek to critique and

transcend.

Solidarity of the Shaken: Poststructuralism and Colonial Unknowing

“The scream that goes through the house is the heartbeat that makes audible, at last, who we are, how resonant we are, how connected we are.”

—Arnold Weinstein41

Questions of ethics, solidarity, and humanism have come to occupy an

increasingly central position in contemporary poststructuralist and feminist theory.

Where there was once a relative consensus that the philosophical tenets of

poststructuralism—anti-foundationalism, the emphasis on the multiplicity of possible

readings or interpretations, and the critique of subjectivity—rule out an engagement

with concrete ethical issues and the articulation of substantive responses to them, recent

years have witnessed a poststructuralist “turn to ethics.” Building on the works of

Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas, thinkers such as Judith Butler, Simon

Critchley, David Campbell, Francois Raffoul, Stephen White, and Ewa Ziarek have

40 See, indicatively, Duncan Bell, Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire (Princeton University Press, 2016); Mehta, Liberalism and Empire; Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton University Press, 2009).

41 Arnold Weinstein, A Scream Goes Through the House: What Literature Teaches Us about Life (Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2004), xii.

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argued for an ethics characterised by infinite responsibility to the Other.42 This is a

cosmopolitan genre that seeks to forge bonds of solidarity on the level of affect, and

which is grounded in shared experiences of mourning, pain, suffering, and loss. Bonnie

Honig describes this as a “turn to Antigone”, highlighting how these thinkers seek to

counter sovereign violence and rationality (identified with Oedipus) with a new

humanism grounded in exposure, ek-stasis, mortality, and vulnerability (identified with

Antigone). Humanism, Honig argues, has thus made a comeback: this is “not the

rationalist universalist variety discredited by post-structuralism and the horrific events

of the twentieth century, but a newer variant that asserts that what is common to humans

is not rationality but the ontological fact of mortality, not the capacity to reason but

vulnerability to suffering.”43

Judith Butler has been at the forefront in theorising such a cosmopolitan ethics

centred around notions of vulnerability to suffering. In Giving An Account of Oneself,

Precarious Life, and Frames of War she calls for a “reconceptualization of the Left”

based on precariousness as “a shared condition of human life.”44 As she explains, “we

are, as it were, social beings from the start, dependent on what is outside ourselves, on

others, on institutions, and on sustained and sustainable environments, and so are, in this

sense, precarious.” She argues that mindfulness of this ontological vulnerability can

serve as a new basis of political community, enabling a “we” to be formed across

cultures of difference. The experience of loss and mourning is central to this project

because, as Butler explains, it unravels the precariousness of life and our vulnerability to

the Other, showing that we are never completely autonomous “bounded beings”45 but

always already linked to others, to strangers. Indeed, “many people think that grief is

privatizing, that it returns us to a solitary situation and is, in that sense, depoliticizing.

But I think it furnishes a sense of political community of a complex order, and it does

this first of all by bringing to the fore the relational ties that have implications for

theorizing fundamental dependency and ethical responsibility.”46

42 See Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004); Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (Verso Books, 2013); Campbell, National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity and Justice in Bosnia; David Campbell and Michael Shapiro, Moral Spaces: Rethinking Ethics and World Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1999); François Raffoul, The Origins of Responsibility (Indiana University Press, 2010); Stephen K. White, The Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen (Harvard University Press, 2009); Ewa Płonowska Ziarek, An Ethics of Dissensus: Postmodernity, Feminism, and the Politics of Radical Democracy (Stanford University Press, 2001).

43 Bonnie Honig, Antigone, Interrupted (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 17.44 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2010), 13–14.45 Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 24.46 Butler's argument thus stands in contrast to the psychoanalytic tradition of Freud which understands

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The immediate problem for such an ethics is that “certain human lives are more

grievable than others.”47 While precariousness for Butler is an ontological, shared

condition of humanity, her work is alert to the various ways in which this vulnerability

is differently distributed, rendering some lives more vulnerable than others. In Frames

of War she explains how the possibility of acknowledging another person's vulnerability

and suffering depends on certain “epistemological frames.”48 That is, while some lives

are constructed as grievable and in need of protection, others are cast as bogus,

“collateral damage”, and destructible. As she explains, “[t]hose we kill are not quite

human, and not quite alive.”49 A simple acceptance of grief is therefore not sufficient to

establish bonds of solidarity beyond borders. Rather, the political task consists in

organising precariousness in a more egalitarian way, most crucially by devising

alternative epistemological frames that enable those that are currently excluded to be

recognised as fully human and as lives that matter. When the recognition of corporeal

vulnerability is universally extended, or so the argument goes, there is potential for a

different kind of global politics.

Butler has not been alone in exploring how the experience of vulnerability,

mourning, and suffering can inspire new forms of solidarity. This approach gained

particular traction after 9/11, when a diverse array of theorists began to reflect on how

universal vulnerability can provide the ground for a renewed cosmopolitanism.50

Already in 1989 Richard Rorty argued for a solidarity based on the common human

susceptibility to pain and humiliation. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity he

suggested that progress in the direction of greater human solidarity is achieved by

widening the scope of those who are considered “one of us”, which depends on the

“imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers.”51 More recently, Stephen

White has affirmed an ethics based on the “existential realities” of finitude and

mortality.52 Trauma theorists such as Cathy Caruth have similarly argued that trauma

can serve as a new humanist universal; witnessing trauma, and acknowledging the

capacity for pain that all people share, “may provide the very link between cultures.”53

mourning as a private project. See Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, 22.47 Butler, 30.48 Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, 9.49 Butler, 42.50 See James Brassett, “Cosmopolitan Sentiments after 9-11? Trauma and the Politics of Vulnerability,”

Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies 2 (2010).51 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge University Press, 1989), xvi.52 White, The Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen; Stephen K. White, Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths

of Weak Ontology in Political Theory (Princeton University Press, 2000).53 Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (JHU Press, 1995), 11.

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Trauma makes us realise the shared humanity that links us to others who suffer; as

Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman explain, “the human being suffering from trauma”

is “the very embodiment of our common humanity.”54 Media and communication

scholars Lili Chouliaraki and Susie Linfield have similarly explored how imaginative

identification with those who suffer can function as a catalyst for the

“cosmopolitanization” of solidarity.55 For Chouliaraki and Linfield, stories and images

of suffering are the primers for the exercise of our “citizenship of the world”, for the

sentimental education of “our moral community”, and for the training of our empathetic,

moral imagination.

While this critical turn to suffering and vulnerability has had a pronounced

influence on international political theory,56 a number of critics have denounced it for

reanimating an extra- or pre-political ground for politics; that is, for substituting politics

for ethics or ontology.57 Honig, perhaps most forcefully, has argued that Butler's ethics

of mourning succumbs to a “Hamletization” of politics which transforms “'the figure of

the avenger into a reflective, self-conscious melancholic', mournful, and incapable of

action.”58 A “politics of lamentation”, she suggests, easily slides into a “lamentation of

politics” which merely mourns, rather than challenges, sovereign violence.59 Whilst

some of this critique is overstated, it nonetheless points to a crucial issue: namely,

whether an ethics grounded in the generalized suffering of a generic humanity is the best

way for counteracting contemporary forms of violence and injustice. Butler, for

example, takes it for granted that the contemporary unequal distribution of mourning—

whereby some forms of suffering and violence manage to generate mass outpourings of

54 Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry Into the Condition of Victimhood (Princeton University Press, 2009), 33.

55 Lilie Chouliaraki, The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post-Humanitarianism (John Wiley & Sons, 2013); Lilie Chouliaraki, The Spectatorship of Suffering (Pine Forge Press, 2006); Susie Linfield, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (University of Chicago Press, 2012).

56 For a selection, see Thomas Gregory, “Potential Lives, Impossible Deaths,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 14, no. 3 (September 1, 2012): 327–47, https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2012.659851; Christina Masters and Elizabeth Dauphinee, eds., The Logics of Biopower and the War on Terror (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Lauren B. Wilcox, Bodies of Violence: Theorizing Embodied Subjects in International Relations (Oxford University Press, 2014); Maja Zehfuss, “Hierarchies of Grief and the Possibility of War: Remembering UK Fatalities in Iraq,” Millennium 38 (2009).

57 For example, see Ella Myers, Wordly Ethics: Democratic Politcis and the Care for the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013); Julian Reid, “The Vulnerable Subject of Liberal War,” South Atlantic Quarterly 110, no. 3 (June 20, 2011): 770–79, https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-1275788; Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo, “Responsibility, Violence, and Catastrophe,” Constellations 15, no. 1 (2008), https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8675.2008.00476.x; Janell Watson, “Butler’s Biopolitics: Precarious Community,” Theory & Event 15, no. 2 (2012).

58 Honig, Antigone, Interrupted, 41.59 Honig, 14.

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outrage, sorrow, or anguish, while others are barely noticed at all—is best countered by

a pronounced emphasis on recognition, cultural difference, and affective identification

with the wounds of others: in essence, by compassion, care, and empathy. Her call for

an international politics of mourning in this way assumes that “proper” recognition will

make the world less violent, and that resistance to normative “frames” will honour and

protect the precarious, disposable bodies shattered throughout the world. As Burkhard

Liebsch's explains, this is a “grief for strangers”, a mode of mourning that refuses to

“abandon the child who dies between boundary stones, the tortured person, the victim of

racist violence, or the starving person to a history that heedlessly walks over dead

bodies.”60 In that, the problem with an ethics of loss, vulnerability, and mourning might

not be its lack of political engagement (as suggested by critics such as Honig) but,

rather, the particular kind of politics it serves to legitimise and make possible.

In her trilogy on national sentimentality, Lauren Berlant problematises one of the

assumptions that underpin the critical turn to ethics; namely, the idea that changes in

feeling and identification with pain lead to structural social change.61 The focus on pain

and suffering, Berlant argues, all to frequently works to turn political problems into an

affective matter to be solved through proper feeling, which obscures the structural

nature of oppression and inequality. In equating structural change with feeling good, the

ethics of compassion and sentimental sympathy for the suffering of others come to

function as “propleptic shields” and as “ethically incontestable legitimating devices for

sustaining the hegemonic field.”62 What, Berlant asks, “if it turns out that compassion

and coldness are not opposite at all but are two sides of a bargain that the subject of

modernity has struck with structural inequity?”63 For Berlant, sentimental politics is an

eminently political project, launched on behalf of the beneficiaries of social injustice: it

is a “defensive response by people who identify with privilege yet fear they will be

exposed as immoral by their tacit sanction of a particular structural violence that

benefits them.”64 Berlant's critique highlights the trajectory on which ethical conceptions

such as those of Butler and Rorty are based: from pain to recognition to solidarity; or,

from apathy to empathy to moral action. Such a perspective not only takes for granted

60 Burkhard Liebsch and Donald Goodwin, “Grief as a Source, Expression, and Register of Political Sensitivity,” Social Research: An International Quarterly 83, no. 2 (October 4, 2016): 242.

61 Lauren Berlant, “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics,” in Cultural Pluralism, Identity Politics, and the Law, ed. Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns (University of Michigan Press, 2001).

62 Berlant, 109.63 Lauren Berlant, Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion (Routledge, 2014), 10.64 Berlant, “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics,” 83–4.

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that a life that matters is a life that is recognised by “us”—in other words, by those with

power and privilege located in the global North. It also fails to move beyond the frame

of recognition to interrogate the material structures of oppression that produce pain,

suffering, and vulnerability as global and racialized conditions. As Neil Lazarus and

Rashmi Varma have argued, these ethical perspectives ultimately call for “minor

adaptions” and a passive reconfiguration of the hegemonic order, rather than a

revolutionary displacement of the system.65 In a series of controversial tweets published

in 2012, novelist Teju Cole describes this as a “white-saviour industrial complex”,

which allows people with power and privilege to feel outrage at isolated disasters

without taking note of the larger disasters behind them. As Cole explains, this is a form

of solidarity in which “we can participate in the economic destruction of Haiti over long

years, but when the earthquake strikes it feels good to send $10 each to the rescue

fund.”66 This form of solidarity produces no action towards justice; instead it is a “non-

confrontational politics” which, as James Petras has argued, takes up struggles against

injustice without engaging “the social system that produces these conditions.”67

In the end, the poststructuralist call for a new form of solidarity turns out to be

not all that different from the liberal version it sets out to critique.68 While thinkers such

as Butler are deeply critical of the abstract subject that anchors liberal ethics, their own

ethical formulations operate behind a similar veil of ignorance: namely, behind the

generalized and anonymised suffering of a generic humanity. The result is a similar

erasure of history, and a transformation of the relation between the oppressor and

oppressed into one of the lucky and the unlucky. By substituting abstract humanity for

historical humanity, these perspectives ultimately elide the historically instantiated

difference between what Sunera Thobani describes as “those doing the occupying and

65 Neill Lazarus and Rashmi Varma, “Marxism and Postcolonial Studies,” in Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism, ed. Jacques Bidet (BRILL, 2008).

66 Teju Cole, “The White-Savior Industrial Complex,” The Atlantic, March 21, 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-white-savior-industrial-complex/254843/

67 James Petras, “NGOs: In the Service of Imperialism,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 29, no. 4 (January 1, 1999): 435, https://doi.org/10.1080/00472339980000221.

68 In a recent article, Ansems de Vries et al similarly argue that poststructuralist thought, “despite its commitment to critiquing modern, liberal ontologies” often tacitly reproduce “these same ontologies... resulting in a failure to grasp contemporary structures and histories of violence and domination.” See Leonie Ansems de Vries et al., “Collective Discussion: Fracturing Politics (Or, How to Avoid the Tacit Reproduction of Modern/Colonial Ontologies in Critical Thought),” International Political Sociology 11, no. 1 (March 1, 2017): 90, https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olw028. Robert Meister makes a similar point in After Evil when he notes that “like today’s humanitarian politics, the first imperative of Levinasian ethics like humanitarian is to avoid historical contextualization.” Meister, After Evil, 2011, 43.

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those being occupied.”69

So far I have argued that cosmopolitan articulations of solidarity—in its liberal

as well as critical-poststructuralist form—often fail to take seriously questions of race,

colonialism, and their contemporary legacies. Because of this they frequently fall into

the trap of reproducing and legitimising the current unjust, racialized global order. But

what about the growing body of literature on postcolonial cosmopolitanism—

scholarship that does centre-stage the colonial question? In the next section I turn to the

work of Kwame Anthony Appiah and Homi Bhabha to show that a postcolonial re-

reading of cosmopolitanism “from below” in fact is insufficient to properly address the

racial structuring of the international. Postcolonial approaches do not so much challenge

as supplement hegemonic forms of cosmopolitanism, offering a description of how

cosmopolitan sentiments might come into being from below. As we shall see, in

conceiving of colonialism in purely civilisational terms, and Eurocentrism as a mainly

cultural force, these approaches ultimately elide the political economy of race and the

materiality of the global colour line.

Solidarity From Below: Postcolonialism and the Elision of Political Economy

In recent years postcolonial thinkers such as Kwame Anthony Appiah and Homi

Bhabha have sought to derive a rooted, vernacular, and subaltern form of

cosmopolitanism. These attempts to rethink cosmopolitanism from the margins emerged

as a response to critiques that cosmopolitanism is an elitist project born out of

economic, political, and cultural privilege. As Craig Calhoun has famously argued, the

culture of cosmopolitanism has historically flourished in locations created by empire

and capitalism; today it finds its strongest expression among “the top management of

multinational corporations and even more in the consulting firms that serve them.”70

Cosmopolitanism, Calhoun concludes, is ultimately no more than a “good ethical

orientation for those privileged to inhabit the frequent traveler lounges.”71

69 Sunera Thobani, “White Wars: Western Feminisms and the `War on Terror’,” Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (August 1, 2007): 176, https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700107078140.

70 Calhoun, “The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travellers: Towards a Critique of Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism,” 106.

71 Calhoun, 8. Jeremy Waldron similarly defines the cosmopolite as someone who “refuses to think of himself as defined by his location or his ancestry or his citizenship or his language. Through he may live in San Francisco and be of Irish ancestry, he does not take his identity to be compromised when he learns Spanish, eats Chinese, wears clothing made in Korea, listens to arias by Verdi sung by a Maori princess on Japanese equipment, follows Ukrainian politics, and practices Buddhist meditation techniques. He is a creature of modernity, conscious of living in a mixed up world and having a mixed up self.” Jeremy Waldron, “Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative,” University of

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Responding to this critique, scholars such as Kwame Anthony Appiah, Homi

Bhabha, Kobena Mercer, Partha Mitter, Fukuyi Kurasawa, and Srinivas Aravamudan

have argued that it in fact is possible to re-conceive cosmopolitanism from the margins.

As Robert Holton explains, there exists a “plurality of forms of cosmopolitanisms”

which expose “the Eurocentricity of the older unitary Western cosmopolitanisms.”72

James Clifford was the first to theorise such a cosmopolitanism from below. In his 1992

article “Traveling Cultures” he contests the idea that cosmopolitans necessarily are

members of a global elite. As he explains,

“people have, for many centuries, constructed their sense of belonging, their notions of home, of spiritual and bodily power and freedom, along a continuum of socio-spatial attachments. These extend from local valleys and neighbourhoods to denser urban sites of encounter and relative anonymity, from national communities tied to a territory to affiliations across borders and oceans. In these diverse contact zones, people sustain critical, non-absolutist strategies for survival and action in a world where space is always already invaded. These competencies can be redeemed under a sign of hope as 'discrepant cosmopolitanism.'”73

For Clifford, there are many different cosmopolitan practices, each with their own

historicity and distinctive world-view. The project of cosmopolitanism, he argues, need

thus not be “class-or ethno-centric.”74

Clifford's ideas have been picked up by a range of authors who have put forward

their own version of “postcolonial”, “rooted”, “subaltern”, “marginal”, “vernacular”,

and “actually existing” cosmopolitanisms.75 As Paul Rabinow explains, these

Michigan Journal of Law Reform 25 (1992 1991): 95. Similarly, and as Gurminder Bhambra explains, “'being cosmopolitan' (as a practice) is seen as being in the West and cosmopolitanism (as an idea) is seen as being of the West.” Gurminder Bhambra, “Cosmopolitanism and the Postcolonial Critique,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Cosmopolitanism, ed. Maria Rovisco and Magdalena Nowicka (Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2011), 314.

72 Robert John Holton, “Cosmopolitanism or Cosmopolitanisms? The Universal Races Congress of 1911,” Global Networks 2, no. 2 (April 1, 2002): 153, https://doi.org/10.1111/1471-0374.00033.

73 James Clifford, “Mixed Feelings,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (U of Minnesota Press, 1998), 367.

74 James Clifford, “Travelling Cultures,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler (Psychology Press, 1992), 107.

75 Amongst others, Kobena Mercer has argued for “what could be called a 'cosmopolitanism-from-below', in which perspectives on mass migration, exile, asylum, and border-crossings feature prominently”; Partha Mitter has written about the “virtual” cosmopolitan “who was a native of the peripheries, but who intellectually engaged with the knowledge system of the metropolis”; Uma Kothari has argued that migrants' “lived realities disrupt the predominantly elitist and Eurocentric characterizations of cosmopolitanism”; and Srinivas Aravamudan, in a similar vein, has put forward the idea of the “tropicopolitan” to describe figures such as Olaudah Equiano and Toussaint Louverture who “challenge the developing privilege of Enlightenment cosmopolitans”. See Kobena Mercer, ed., Cosmopolitan Modernisms (London, England : Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2005); Partha Mitter, “Reflections on Modern Art and National Identity in Colonial India,” in Cosmopolitan

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perspectives are committed to an understanding of cosmopolitanism as “an ethos of

macro-interdependencies, with an acute consciousness (often forced upon people) of the

incapabilities and particularities of place, characters, historical trajectories, and fates.”76

The result has been a rapid proliferation of cosmopolitan figures: no longer confined to

the elite traveler, the category of the cosmopolitan is now also used to describe refugees,

migrants, and the diaspora, as well as “North Atlantic merchant sailors, Caribbean au

pairs in the United States, Egyptian guest workers in Iraq, [and] Japanese women who

take gaijin lovers.”77

The idea of a cosmopolitanism from below is perhaps most closely associated

with the work of Hombi Bhabha and Kwame Anthony Appiah. Bhabha, whose approach

is based on the multi-ethnic ethics of British migrants and minorities, has theorised the

existence of a “cosmopolitan community envisaged in marginality.”78 This is a border

zone “between the patriotic and the cosmopolitan, the home and the world”79 which he

labels vernacular cosmopolitanism. British minorities, he argues, lead a “double life...

translating between cultures, renegotiating traditions from a position where 'locality'

insists on its own terms, while entering into larger national and societal

conversations.”80 Vernacular cosmopolitanism is thus to be “on the border, in between,

introducing the global-cosmopolitan 'action at a distance' into the very grounds—now

displaced—of the domestic.”81

Modernisms, ed. Kobena Mercer (Institute of International Visual Arts, 2005); Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804 (Duke University Press, 1999). See also Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton University Press, 2010); Dipesh Chakrabarty et al., Cosmopolitanism (Duke University Press, 2002); Pheng Cheah, Bruce Robbins, and Social Text Collective, Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (U of Minnesota Press, 1998); Uma Kothari, “Global Peddlers and Local Networks: Migrant Cosmopolitanisms,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26, no. 3 (June 1, 2008): 500–516, https://doi.org/10.1068/dcos2; FUYUKI KURASAWA, “A Cosmopolitanism from Below: Alternative Globalization and the Creation of a Solidarity without Bounds,” European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie / Europäisches Archiv Für Soziologie 45, no. 2 (2004): 233–55, https://doi.org/10.2307/23999133; Marianna Papastephanou, Thinking Differently About Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Eccentricity, and the Globalized World (Routledge, 2015); Stephanos Stephanides and Stavros Karayanni, Vernacular Worlds, Cosmopolitan Imagination (BRILL, 2015); Pnina Werbner, Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism: Rooted, Feminist and Vernacular Perspectives (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015).

76 Paul Rabinow, “Representations Are Social Facts,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (University of California Press, 1986), 258.

77 Bruce Robbins, “Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (U of Minnesota Press, 1998), 1.

78 Homi K. Bhabha, “Unsatisfied: Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism,” in Text and Nation: Cross-Disciplinary Essays on Cultural and National Identities, ed. Laura García-Moreno and Peter C. Pfeiffer (Camden House, 1996), 195–6.

79 Bhabha, “Unsatisfied: Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism.”80 Bhabha, 139.81 Bhabha, 196.

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Appiah, meanwhile, has called for a “rooted” cosmopolitanism which puts

Western and non-Western (in particular, African) values, traditions, and debates about

human rights, citizenship, and cultural identity into dialogue.82 Reading Western

Enlightenment liberal thinkers such as John Stuart Mill alongside Asante philosophy

and the political experience of his Ghanian father, who lived through colonialism and

the anti-colonial struggle for liberation and independence, Appiah outlines a new and

dialogic cosmopolitanism committed to acknowledging and pursuing difference and

cultural hybridisation. In contrast to those who see cosmopolitanism as the antidote to

nationalism, he maintains that cosmopolitanism in fact begins from membership in

communities that value notions such as toleration and openness to the world and others.

He is careful to point out that this is different from communitarianism, because rooted

cosmopolitanism “is not the name for a dialogue among static closed cultures, each of

which is internally homogenous and different from the others: not a celebration of the

beauty of a collection of closed boxes.”83 Rather, it is based on the idea that “localism is

an instrument to achieve universal ideals, universal goals.”84 On this basis, he goes on to

argue, it is possible to construct “a form of universalism that is sensitive to the ways in

which historical context may shape the significance of a practice.”85

What unites theorists such as Clifford, Bhabha, and Appiah is an emphasis on the

non-elite as well as a refusal to choose between postcolonial nationalism and

cosmopolitanism. Offering a via media between liberal cosmopolitanism and

communitarianism, they seek to combine respect for local differences with universal

principles. As Angela Taraborelli explains, “for cosmopolitanism from below,

cosmopolitanism and national (or national conscience), global and local are not

necessarily mutually antithetical.”86 Where liberal versions of cosmopolitanism

emphasise the formation of a global culture based on international law and institutions,

postcolonial forms of cosmopolitanism thus rely on global pluralism and difference. In

82 Appiah, The Ethics of Identity. See also Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, Reprint edition (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007) and Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Patriots,” Critical Inquiry 23, no. 3 (1997): 617–39, https://doi.org/10.2307/1344038.

83 Appiah, The Ethics of Identity, 256.84 Appiah, 241.85 Appiah, 256.86 Angela Taraborrelli, Contemporary Cosmopolitanism (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015), 92. Meyda

Yegenoglu similarly argues that cosmopolitanism from below is “less dismissive of the need for nationalism in the Third World, a nationalism that is capable of articulating the will of the excluded subaltern populations”. See Meyda Yeĝenoĝlu, “Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism in a Globalized World,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 28, no. 1 (January 1, 2005): 103, https://doi.org/10.1080/0141987042000280030.

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the words of Kurasawa, “transnational social integration along cosmopolitan lines does

not require cultural assimilation but, on the contrary, the acknowledgement of global

diversity.”87

While these approaches have been successful in demonstrating that

cosmopolitanism need not be elitist, they are not without their problems. As David

Harvey points out, vernacular cosmopolitanisms are more concerned with articulating

“locally meaningful, relational futures than with transformation at a systemic level.”88

While thinkers such as Bhabha and Appiah are critical of traditional top-down

approaches, their rooted and vernacular alternatives do not so much challenge as

supplement them, providing a description of how cosmopolitan sentiments might come

into being from below. For Harvey, Appiah's call for a rooted cosmopolitanism even

“ends up supporting the liberal and neoliberal imperialist practices that reproduce class

inequalities, while soothing our nerves with respect to multicultural differences.”89

Alfredo Gonzales-Ruibal has similarly argued that postcolonial cosmopolitanisms elide

“global structural inequalities, long-term processes of oppression, and the real and

traumatic impact that Western culture and politics exercise over the third world.”90

Postcolonial versions of cosmopolitanism do not disturb or quarrel with colonial

relations of power and the global colour line; quite the opposite, these “liberals on

safari”91 actually sanction the status quo, because they allow Western elites “to keep

their lifestyles and worldviews, while at the same time appeasing their consciences.”92

The underlying problem, as materialist thinkers such as Benita Parry and Neil Lazarus

remind us, is that the field of postcolonial studies historically has overlooked the link

between colonialism and the wider history of capitalist development. By conceiving of

colonialism in purely civilisational terms, and Eurocentrism as a mainly cultural force,

postcolonialism has often helped mystify the larger historical dynamic of global

capitalism and its role in reproducing racial differences.93 That is, in approaching race

87 KURASAWA, “A Cosmopolitanism from Below,” 239.88 David Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom (Columbia University Press, 2009),

113.89 Harvey, 115.90 Alfredo González-Ruibal, “Vernacular Cosmopolitanism: An Archeological Critique of Universalistic

Reason,” in Cosmopolitan Archaeologies, ed. Lynn Meskell (Duke University Press, 2009), 118.91 González-Ruibal, 118.92 González-Ruibal, 118.93 For a historical materialist critique of postcolonialism, see Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus,

Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2002); Benita Parry, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (Routledge, 2004); Lazarus and Varma, “Marxism and Postcolonial Studies”; Neil Lazarus, “What Postcolonial Theory Doesn’t Say,” Race & Class 53, no. 1 (July 1, 2011): 3–27, https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396811406778; Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (Verso Books, 2013).

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through the lens of difference rather than domination, these perspective ultimately evade

the materiality of racial hierarchies, including the entanglements of the racialized social

order, the spread of empire, and capitalist accumulation. This is in contrast to earlier

anti-colonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, C.L.R. James, Claudia Jones, Amílcar

Cabral, Cedric Robinson, and Angela Davis, who situated their critiques of colonialism

and racial oppression within a historical materialist framework. In chapter 3 I argue that

addressing the coloniality of mainstream perspectives requires more than “plural”,

“hybrid”, and “diverse” re-readings of cosmopolitanism. As we shall see, it necessitates

that the very nature and problem of the global colour line be rethought through a

materialist lens, so as to uncover the link between the logic of capital and the production

of racial difference. Before moving on to this, we must first consider the ideological

work done by cosmopolitan formulations of solidarity, in its liberal, poststructuralist,

and postcolonial forms.

The Swindle

In The Meursault Investigation, Kamel Daoud offers a postcolonial rejoinder to

Albert Camus' absurdist classic The Stranger. Told in the words of Harun—the brother

of the nameless Arab murdered by Camus' protagonist in the blazing sun on an Algerian

beach—Daoud makes us remember what Camus erased: Africa. The Stranger, he wants

us to understand, is ultimately a “swindle.” It presents itself as an existential reflection

on man's absurd condition but is, in actuality, structured by French colonialism and an

imperial sensibility that renders native Algerians as faceless puppets and mannequins: as

the background against which the adventure of the central, European character unfolds.

As Harun tells us:

“The books success is still undiminished, but I repeat, I think it's an awful swindle. After Independence, the more I read of your hero's work, the more I had the feeling I was pressing my face against the window of a big room where a party was going on that neither my mother nor I had been invited to. Everything happened without us. There's not a trace of our loss or of what became of us afterward. No a single trace, my friend! The whole world eternally witnesses the same murder in the blazing sun, but no one saw anything, and no one watched us recede into the distance. No

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one! There's good reason to get a little angry, don't you think?”94

Like The Stranger, cosmopolitan formulations of solidarity can be thought of as

a swindle: as structured by a colonial condition they legitimate as they obfuscate. As

Sankaran Krishna reminds us in an article from 2001, the whole of IR is “predicated on

a systematic politics of forgetting, a wilful amnesia, on the question of race.”95 IR's

founding narrative of the territorially sovereign state system is kept in place and made

possible by the “valorization, indeed fetishization, of abstraction” which removes from

view the “violence, genocide, and theft that marked the encounter between the rest and

the West in the post-Columbian era.”96 In cosmopolitan theorising, this valorisation of

abstraction shows up as a preference for what Raymond Geuss has called “ethics-first”:

the idea that “there is, or could be, such a thing as a separate discipline called Ethics

which... can be studied without locating it in the rest of life, and in relation to claims of

history, sociology and economics.”97 From this flows the belief that ethical inquiry is

separate from moral practice and, thus, that ethics can be abstracted from particular

histories and geographical circumstances. As we have seen, liberal, poststructural and,

to some extent, postcolonial cosmopolitans all strive for an apolitical understanding of

solidarity, one that is grounded in ontology and arise from a pre-existing moral relation

—be it rationality, sovereignty, vulnerability, or suffering. This focus on abstraction,

ahistoricism, and anti-politics is not innocent: indeed, it contributes to a wilful amnesia

on the question of race in world politics. As Krishna makes clear, the “fetish for

abstraction [is] deeply political and depoliticizing”98 because it brackets questions of

history, “of theft of land, violence, and slavery—the three processes that have

historically underlain the unequal global order we now find ourselves in.”99 As anti-

colonial scholars and practitioners such as Césaire, Cabral, and Fanon remind us, wilful

amnesia sits at the heart of the colonial project—because it sanctions the idea, not only

that the world is postcolonial and postracial, but also that the long history of

colonialism, racialized indentured servitude, Indigenous genocide, and transatlantic

94 Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation (Oneworld Publications, 2015), 64.95 Sankaran Krishna, “Race, Amnesia, and the Education of International Relations,” Alternatives:

Global, Local, Political 26, no. 4 (2001): 401, https://doi.org/10.2307/40645028.96 Krishna, 401.97 Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). See

also Bernard Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument (Princeton University Press, 2009).

98 Krishna, “Race, Amnesia, and the Education of International Relations,” 402.99 Krishna, 401–2.

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slavery have left no traces in culture, language, and knowledge production.100

Viewed from this perspective, the cosmopolitan disavowal of the global colour

line is, as Charls Mills has argued, less the result of a “mysterious omission than a

straightforward implication of a framework built on mystifying the past and the

present.”101 After all, the act of forgetting is never benign: rather, and as Ann Laura

Stoler points out, it is a political condition and a form of “remembering otherwise.”102 In

telling the story of Meursault, Camus forgot nothing; as a settler and pied-noir in

Algeria, his life was shaped by French colonialism. Colonialism is at once everywhere

and nowhere in The Stranger. In cosmopolitan formulations of solidarity, it is similarly

hidden in plain sight. Indeed, in their desire to carve out a moral, impartial, and

ahistorical space beyond ideology and political differences, cosmopolitan thinkers

frequently repress the global histories of empire and colonial capitalism. The result is an

inherently hierarchical and ahistorical understanding of solidarity, one that is based on

the authority of the international and its (supposedly) clean hands. Ultimately, by

addressing the “international community” as bystanders rather than beneficiaries (who

are not to blame for the excesses and violence of the current order), these perspectives

invite the white subject to understand itself as if outside of history, and thus as

inherently “ethical” and “good.” The result is a shift in focus, from questions of

accountability, guilt, restitution, repentance, and structural reform to matters of empathy,

generosity, and hospitality: a politics of pity rather than justice, in the words of Hannah

Arendt, and a consequent recasting of the responsible colonial agent into an innocent

bystander.103

A swindle, in other words.

Conclusion

In this chapter I have argued that cosmopolitan theories of solidarity contribute

100 Charles W. Mills, “Global White Ignorance,” in Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies, ed. Matthias Gross and Linsey McGoey, 2015. See also Barnor Hesse, “Forgotten Like a Bad Dream: Atlantic Slavery and the Ethics of Postcolonial Memory,” in Relocating Postcolonialism, ed. David Theo Goldberg and Ato Quayson (Wiley-Blackwell, 2002); Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (Columbia University Press, 2005); Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (Duke University Press, 2016); Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (SUNY Press, 2007); Manu Vimalassery, Juliana Hu Pegues, and Aloysha Goldstein, “On Colonial Unknowing,” Theory & Event 19, no. 4 (2016).

101 Mills, “Realizing (Through Radicalizing) Pogge,” 169.102 See Stoler, Duress, especially chapter 4 on the labour of forgetting.103 For an explanation of the difference between justice and pity, see Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering:

Morality, Media and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1999).

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to an ideological formation that rationalises and legitimises the racial structuring of

world politics. In seeking to derive an apolitical understanding of solidarity, these

approaches privilege ontological reflection above and before analysis of historical and

material relations of power. The cosmopolitan valorisation of ontological thinking—

which sees solidarity as arising from a pre- or extra-political moral relation—is not

innocent, because it reduces political conflicts “to an ethical narrative structured around

binaries of good/evil and saviours/victims. As Meister demonstrates in After Evil,

cosmopolitan political theory presents itself as having transcended the old politics of

revolution and counterrevolution. This is in contrast to revolutionary ideologies which,

as Meister argues, typically conceived of “justice-as-struggle.”104 The goal was not only

to overthrow the evil regime but also to force beneficiaries of past injustice to relinquish

their illegitimate gains. In contrast, cosmopolitanism rests on a sympathetic

identification with innocent victims on all sides. At the heart of this is a more narrow

understanding of the concept of “evil.” Instead of “a system of social injustice that can

have ongoing structural effects, even after the structure is dismantled”,105 the utmost

form of evil is here seen as physical violence against the human body. As we shall see in

the next chapter, for cosmopolitans stopping evil thus “consists of rescuing those who

suffer, even if that suffering is inflicted in the name of revolution.”106 This shift—from

revolutionary justice to an ethics based on putting an end to physical violence—would

have been inconceivable without the demise of the global struggles against colonialism

and capitalism. In fact, and as Randall Williams has argued, today's cosmopolitanism

has not just replaced the Third World decolonising struggles of the 1950-70s, but has

“come to oppose other progressive forms.”107

In the end, the problem with cosmopolitan approaches to international solidarity

is not only that they substitute ethical truths for political struggle. They also contribute

to a wilful amnesia on the question of race in world politics—a point that was made by

Du Bois already in 1944. By transforming the responsible colonial agent into an

innocent bystander, these perspectives turn questions of accountability, guilt, restitution,

repentance, and structural reform, into matters of hospitality, generosity,

humanitarianism, and empathy—a self-congratulatory defense of the racialized unequal

and unjust status quo. Framed as a one-way street whereby powerful and privileged

104 Meister, After Evil, 2011, 22.105 Meister, 25.106 Meister, 20.107 Williams, The Divided World: Human Rights and Its Violence, 16.

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actors extend solidarity, compassion, and empathy to those who suffer, the praxis of

international solidarity here becomes “a matter of self-empowerment through which the

idealized Western subject improves his humanity at the expense of the suffering of

others through the practice of deferred complicity.”108 Cosmopolitan approaches thus

turn out to themselves be underpinned by a particular racial logic—based on the desire

to protect and offer political resistance for endangered others—which enables the white

Western subject to re-constitute itself as “ethical” and “good”, innocent of its imperialist

histories and present complicities. As we shall see, the cosmopolitan projection of the

world as an ethical space is ultimately a historically produced discourse, intimately

linked to the defeat of the global counterrevolutions to colonialism and capitalism.

108 Gaztambide-Fernández, “Decolonization and the Pedagogy of Solidarity,” 55.

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C H A P T E R 2

From Revolution to Ethics: Historicizing the Cosmopolitan Turn

“In 1968 that word—revolution—was on everyone's lips. By the early 1980s and especially by the 1990s, everywhere one turned, there was talk of ethics. What

had been revolutionized was the very notion of revolution itself.”—Julian Bourg1

Introduction

In an article reflecting on the politics of humanitarianism, Didier Fassin argues

that the past fifty years have undergone a radical shift in moral outlook; “Whereas, not

so long ago, that is until the 1960s, volunteers went off to fight alongside peoples in

their liberation struggles, it is now humanitarian workers who go to take care of victims

of conflict.”2 Indeed, where the language evoked to defend oppressed peoples used to

focus on revolution and anti-imperialism, today we favour “the vocabulary of

psychology to sensitize the world to their misfortune.”3 In our era, Fassin seems to

suggest, it is the “the Holocaust” and not “the Revolution” that has come to define the

relation between ethics and politics.

In this chapter I take Fassin's observation as the starting point for deepening my

analysis of cosmopolitanism, ethics, and the global colour line. In the previous chapter I

argued that cosmopolitan theories of solidarity are premised on the idea that it is

possible, and indeed desirable, to separate ethics and politics (or ontology and history).

In this chapter I subject this assumption to theoretical and empirical inquiry and

challenge. Interrogating the historical, political, and conceptual conditions of possibility

of the turn to cosmopolitan political theory, I argue that the meaning of solidarity has

undergone a radical transformation since the 1970s, as discourses of ethics, empathy,

and suffering have come to displace the language of revolution, liberation, and

decolonisation. My analysis reveals that this discursive shift reflects particular historical

and material conditions, which include the global defeat of the counterrevolutions to

colonialism and capitalism, the transformation of the old (Euro-American) Left, the

American search for a new moral vocabulary after Vietnam, and the globalisation of

1 Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought (McGill-Queen’s Press - MQUP, 2007), 4.

2 Didier Fassin, “The Humanitarian Politics of Testimony: Subjectification through Trauma in the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict,” Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 3 (November 4, 2012): 532.

3 Fassin, 532.

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neoliberal capitalism. A critical analysis of these structuring forces not only calls into

question the ethics/politics distinction on which the cosmopolitan project is based. As

we shall see, it also demonstrates that cosmopolitanism's preference for abstraction,

ahistoricism, and anti-politics is an eminently political strategy; a strategy that helps to

uphold, legitimise, and entrench the current unjust and unequal racialized international

order.

I develop this argument in four sections. I begin with a short introduction to

Marxist approaches to political theory in order to answer the question: Why historicize?

That is, why subject theoretical texts to historical analysis? Drawing on scholars such as

Ellen Meiksins Woods, C.B. Macpherson, and Richard Ashcraft, I argue that political

theory needs to be understood as historical product, and as anchored in particular

material conditions and relations of power. Building on this, the following sections

interrogate the conditions of possibility of the rise of cosmopolitan ethics. My analysis

centre-stages the two world revolutions of 1848 and 1968, and shows how these gave

rise to moral discourses seeking to legitimise, perpetuate, and entrench the current world

order. I begin by detailing the birth and evolution of Victorian humanism, from the

foundation of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in 1853 to its

apogee with the creation of the League of Nations in 1919. As the global contest

between the superpowers built up and Europe lost its empire after the Second World

War, these ethical discourses temporarily receded into the background. Sections three

and four analyse the structuring forces that returned humanism in the 1970s. I argue that

the resurgence of cosmopolitan thinking is intimately linked to the defeat of the global

counterrevolutions to colonialism and capitalism, as well as the globalisation of

neoliberal capitalism. This propelled a return to Victorian humanist ideas about the

white man's burden, and a consequent transformation of the meaning of solidarity. As

Kant displaced Marx, and discourses of empathy and suffering superseded the language

of struggle and liberation, solidarity would increasingly come to be associated with

ethics—and not the revolution.

Why Historize? A Marxist Approach to Political Theory

The idea that political theory must be historicized is most commonly associated

with Marxist methods of interpretation. In contrast to the cosmopolitan thinkers

discussed in the previous chapter, Marxist interpretation approaches political theory as

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historical product.4 Marx developed this idea in The German Ideology, where he

criticised the Young or Left Hegelians for wrongfully considering thoughts and ideas as

freestanding from material surroundings; “It has not occurred to any one of these

philosophers”, he argued, “to inquire into the connection of German philosophy with

German reality, the connection of their criticism with their own material surroundings.”5

For Marx, this was problematic because “[t]he mode of production of material life

conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general.”6 Indeed, “[i]t is

not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their

social being that determines their consciousness.”7 Political theorists such as Ellen

Meiksins Wood, C.B. Macpherson, and Richard Ashcraft have extended this idea by

highlighting the political and ideological—as opposed to philosophical or idealistic—

nature of political theory. Academic theory, they argue, does not exist in a sphere

independent of economic, political, and ideological conflicts, but is a reflection of

particular historical and material conditions. This means that the goal of the Marxist

critic is to expose “the illusion of the epoch” by showing how political theory texts work

to universalise particular (class) interests.

In her “social history of Western political theory”,8 Ellen Meiksins Wood details

the requirements and political stakes of Marxist interpretation. Examining the specific

historical contexts in which thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, and

Thomas Aquinas developed their canonical works, she argues that “the political

questions addressed by political theorists are thrown up by real political life and are

shaped by the historical conditions in which they arise.”9 This might sound similar to the

historical approach associated with the Cambridge School. However, unlike Cambridge

School scholars such as Skinner and Pocock—for whom political theory needs to be

situated in relation to specific texts and intellectual debates of the time—Wood also

seeks to unravel the link between material conditions and political ideas. Political

theory, she argues, must be analysed in relation to the material and class interests it

4 For a good introduction to Marxian interpretation, see Richard Ashcraft, “Political Theory and the Problem of Ideology,” The Journal of Politics 42, no. 3 (August 1, 1980): 687–705, https://doi.org/10.2307/2130546; Katherine A. Gordy, “Marxian Interpretations of Political Theory,” in Interpretation in Political Theory, ed. Clement Fatovic and Sean Noah Walsh (Taylor & Francis, 2016); Ellen Meiksins Wood, Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Antiquity to the Late Middle Ages (Verso Books, 2011).

5 Quoted in Allen Oakley, Marx’s Critique of Political Economy Volume One: Intellectual Sources and Evolution (Routledge, 2013), 90.

6 Oakley, 103.7 Oaklet, 103.8 Wood, Citizens to Lords.9 Wood, 8.

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serves and from which it emerges. This means interrogating the “relations between

people who produce and those who appropriate what others produce”; “the forms of

property that emerge from these social relations”; and “how these relations are

expressed in political domination, as well as resistance and struggle.”10

One of the best-known examples of Marxist interpretation in practice is C.B.

Macpherson's The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, published in 1962. In

this work Macpherson interrogates how and why contractarian thinkers such as Hobbes

and Locke embraced an understanding of the individual as “essentially the proprietor of

his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them.”11 His analysis details

how Hobbes and Locke took this idea from their surrounding capitalist relations, at the

same time that they helped justify them. As Macpherson points out, capitalism only

makes sense as long as humans are understood as possessive individuals. Through their

market assumptions about human nature, Hobbes and Locke thus helped legitimise

particular inequalities endemic to market relations because

“the maintenance [of any particular system of property] requires at least the acquiescence of the bulk of the people, and the positive support of any leading classes. Such support requires a belief that the institution serves some purpose or fills some need. That belief requires, in turn, that there be a theory which both explains and justifies the institution in terms of the purpose served or the need filled.”12

For Macpherson, this is precisely what possessive individualist theories do—and as such

political theory is neither neutral nor autonomous.

In the discipline of IR, the best example of Marxist interpretation is perhaps E.H.

Carr's classic The Twenty Years' Crisis. While Carr often is categorised as a realist

thinker—belonging to the same camp as Morgenthau and Niebuhr—his critique of

interwar liberal internationalism is in fact an exercise in Marxist interpretation and

ideology critique.13 Thinkers such as Norman Angell and Leonard Woolf were,

according to Carr, exponents of the ideology of the rich and powerful states. Liberal

assumptions about the hidden hand—which postulates that the market is what provides

10 Wood, 12.11 Crawford Brough Macpherson and Frank Cunningham, The Political Theory of Possessive

Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford University Press, 2011), 3.12 Quoted in Peter Lindsay, Creative Individualism: The Democratic Vision of C. B. Macpherson (SUNY

Press, 1996), 71.13 For a good overview of Carr's Marxist commitments, see Peter Wilson, “Radicalism for a

Conservative Purpose: The Peculiar Realism of E. H. Carr,” Millennium 30, no. 1 (January 1, 2001): 123–36, https://doi.org/10.1177/03058298010300010901.

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the greatest possible freedom, welfare, and peace for all humanity as a whole—were,

for Carr, the ideological move par excellence. That is, by elevating law, order, and

laissez faire capitalism to the status of universal principles, interwar liberals failed to see

the self-interested character of their own thought.

To summarise, Marxist interpretation points to the necessity of giving political

theory a foundation in history and revealing its ideological function. As Karl Mannheim

explained, “there are modes of thought which cannot be adequately understood as long

as their social origins are obscured.”14 Political theory does not take place in an

autonomous realm, but is a deeply and inherently political exercise.15 The task, thus, is

to situate arguments that present themselves as expressing timeless and universal

interests and to expose the particular interests that they serve. The majority of Marxist

works of interpretation have so far focused on canonical texts in political theory, with

little or no work being done on contemporary political theorising. While scholars such

as Anthony Pagden have shown that cosmopolitan discourses historically have

flourished in locales of empire, there have been relatively few attempts to historicize the

post-1989 revival of cosmopolitan political theory.16 Seeking to address this lacunae, in

what follows I interrogate the historical, conceptual, and political conditions of

possibility of the recent turn to cosmopolitanism. What, I ask, would it mean to think of

contemporary cosmopolitanism as a historically produced discourse and—crucially—as

an ideological reflection of particular material conditions?

Victorian Beginnings: 1848 and the White Man's Burden

The historical roots of cosmopolitanism are often said to reside in Cynic and

Stoic philosophy, in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the French and American

Revolutions, in Tom Paine's The Rights of Man and Immanuel Kant's Perpetual Peace.

According to standard Whig historiography, these unfolding ideas about justice,

freedom, and human dignity came into their own in the post-Cold War era, where they

14 Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (Routledge, 2013), 2.15 This critique is no longer unique to Marxism. More recently postcolonial, decolonial, and feminist

scholars have also challenged the idea that knowledge production can take place outside of history and social relations. Indicatively, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton University Press, 2000); Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 25th Anniversary Ed with 1995 Afterword Ed edition (London: Penguin Books, 2003); Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988).

16 Exceptions include Stephen Hopgood, The Endtimes of Human Rights (Cornell University Press, 2013); Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia (Harvard University Press, 2012). See also Anthony Pagden, The Burdens of Empire: 1539 to the Present (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 7.

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paved the way for cosmopolitan institutions and doctrines such as the International

Criminal Court (ICC) in 2002 and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) in 2005. In what

follows I challenge this interpretation by demonstrating that the rise of cosmopolitanism

in the 1990s is less the result of a steady, gradual climb towards global justice, and more

the product of a set of historical and material conditions which in the late 20 th century

made it highly desirable for policymakers, activists, and intellectuals to think of world

politics as an ethical space. To understand what these conditions were we must begin

much earlier—in fact, with the revolutions of 1848 and the “enlightened conservatism”

to which they gave rise.

In The Endtimes of Human Rights Stephen Hopgood details the Victorian

origins of contemporary discourses of human rights, humanitarianism, and international

law. Victorian humanism, he argues, emerged as a response to the rapid social

transformations of the 19th century, including the industrial revolution, the rapid

integration of the world markets, the expansion of the European bourgeoisie, and

urbanisation on an unparalleled scale.17 These historical transformations gave rise to a

wide array of new social problems which threatened to erupt the fabric of European

society. In 1848 revolutions swept across Europe, with over fifty countries affected. The

same year Marx and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto, declaring that “a spectre

is haunting Europe, the spectre of Communism.”18 A few years later, in 1864, the

International Workingmen's Association (better known as the First International) was

formed in London; and then, in 1871, the Paris Commune demonstrated that the rapidly

expanding working class had the capacity to take power in a major European city.

Importantly, and as Robin D.G. Kelley observes,

“We tend to picture the 1848 revolutions... as the story of white men in the trenches, red flag unfurled in the name of bearded and proud skilled workers. But the 'colored' world remained a haunting specter in 1848. The Revolution in France resulted in the abolition of slavery in its colonies, forty-four years after African descendants threw them out of Haiti and ended French slavery and colonialism there by combat. The British had abolished slavery fourteen years earlier and were still wrestling their Negro Question: how to turn all this ex-property into willing and docile workers for Britannia.”19

17 In 1800 only 12% of Europe's population lived in sizeable cities; by 1900 this figure had risen to 30%. See Hopgood, The Endtimes of Human Rights, 8; 32.

18 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (The Floating Press, 2009), 4.19 Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Beacon Press, 2003), 40.

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For the ascendant bourgeoisie these developments posed an immanent threat and danger.

The question, as Hopgood explains, was how “the contradictions within scientific and

industrial progress [could] be reconciled while sustaining public order and avoiding

social revolution.”20 The answer came in the form of Victorian moralism, charity, and

universal humanist norms. A key figure in this development was the Genevan

businessman Henri Dunant.

In 1859 Dunant had traveled to Solferino to negotiate his imperial interests in

Algeria with Napoleon III, who at the time was commanding the Franco-Sardinian

troops in northern Italy. Dunant arrived in Solferino to find thousands of soldiers lying

dead and dying on the battlefield. Appalled by the misery and suffering he witnessed,

Dunant joined the local townspeople to provide whatever help he could. He later

described his experience in A Memory of Solferino, a book which became a European

bestseller and spearheaded the birth of humanitarianism. In 1863 Dunant founded the

International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the world's first official international

humanitarian organisation, together with Gustave Moynier, Louis Appia, Theodore

Maunoir, and Henri Dufour. A year later he persuaded the Swiss government to host a

diplomatic conference, which resulted in the adoption of the first Geneva convention.

Gustave Moynier subsequently co-founded the Institut de Droit International (IDI), a

standing council of public international lawyers who would act as the guardians of the

Geneva Convention. As one of its members explained, the IDI was based on the idea

that “protection of the individual is the ultimate purpose of the State and goal of

international relations.”21 Combining an interest in individual rights with

humanitarianism and humanitarian law, these early institutions laid the foundations for

20th century cosmopolitanism.

What united these early pioneers of Victorian humanism—beyond their

immediate compassion for the suffering, wounded, and innocent—was that they all

came from a narrow and exclusive Geneva-based elite. As Caroline Moorehead has

shown, the founders of ICRC all

“belonged to Geneva's oldest, most prosperous families, active over many generations in the law, medicine, the army, and politics, and three of them—Dufour, Moynier, and Appia—were rich enough to not have to work. All were Protestant and practising Christians and shared Dunant's feelings about the ethics of war, 'the moral sense of the importance of

20 Hopgood, The Endtimes of Human Rights, 9.21 Hopgood, 41.

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human life, the humane desire to lighten a little the torments' of the wounded.”22

Hopgood also emphasises the social order on which Victorian humanism was

based: it was middle-class, status quo, and socially reformist. Many of its spokespersons

were already involved in domestic charity work—Florence Nightingale is the most

famous example—and actively campaigned for the importance of education, adequate

housing, health care, orphanages, and so on. These campaigns may have given an aura

of progressiveness yet were, as Hopgood shows, deeply rooted in class interests, “a

product of the 'bourgeois public sphere' and its sense of itself as a distinct class with a

distinct sensibility.”23 The members of ICRC were “cultural Christians, overwhelmingly

Protestant and pious, their social lives organized around conventional patriarchal family

relations.”24 That they were of Protestant background is not irrelevant, nor that the ICRC

chose a Protestant icon—the cross—as its symbol: indeed, Victorian humanism from the

very beginning performed the same function that the Christian god had done in the past.

The humanitarian hero was, in effect, a secular version of the Good Samaritan, and the

suffering, innocent victim a modern take on the crucified Christ.25 That there was a

glaring paradox between being a member of the Genevan elite, on the one hand, and

affirming the universal bonds of suffering that united humankind, on the other, seems

not to have bothered these early humanists. Redistribution of power and resources was

after all not part of their agenda, and as such they often found enthusiastic support

amongst the European aristocracy; Queen Augusta of Prussia, for example, often wore

her Red Cross armband in public and openly spoke of Dunant as a messenger from

God.26 As Hopgood rightly notes, Victorian humanism must for this reason be seen as a

deeply conservative project that strove “to hang on to transcendent authority in the face

of revolutionary social change with a sense of individuals as individuals.”27 This took

the form of a moral duty—a burden through which the Victorians acquired “a sense of

confidence, piety, responsibility, and purpose among themselves”28—to provide

civilization and humanitarian assistance to socially backward classes, races, religions,

and cultures. It was, of course, an inherently imperial project, based on the bourgeoisie's

22 Caroline Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream: War, Switzerland and the History of the Red Cross, 1st Carroll & Graf ed edition (New York: Carroll & Graf Pub, 1999), 17.

23 Hopgood, The Endtimes of Human Rights, 25.24 Hopgood, 10.25 Hopgood, 11.26 John Hutchinson, Champions Of Charity: War And The Rise Of The Red Cross (Hachette UK, 1997).27 Hopgood, The Endtimes of Human Rights, 11.28 Hopgood, 9.

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perceived historical destiny to enlighten others. In his monthly periodical L’Afrique

Explorée et Civilisée, Gustave Moynier, one of the founding fathers of the ICRC and its

subsequent first president, declared his support for the civilising mission; “The white

race should help the black race... and provide it with the tools held by modern

civilization so that it can improve its fate in such a way that coheres with the wishes of

providence.”29 As David Theo Goldberg has shown, humanist campaigns such as the

abolition of slavery were premised on ideas of racial historicism, on “the set of claims

that those not European or descended from Europeans are not inherently inferior but

historically immature or less developed.”30 While racial historicist ideas can be found

already in the writings of John Locke, they rose to prominence in the mid-19th century

as “the violence of an imposed physical repression yield[ed] to the infuriating subtleties

of a legally fashioned racial order.”31 Popularised by thinkers such as John Stuart Mill

and Auguste Comte, racial historicism may have been less overtly violent than the ideas

associated with natural or biological racism; in reality they nonetheless functioned as a

legitimation of the continued expropriation of colonised lands. As Mill made clear in his

Writings on India, it was through the tutelage of the the white man and the introduction

of what the English missionary-explorer David Livingston summed up as the three C's

(commerce, Christianity, and civilization) that natives could achieve progress and

inclusion in history—an idea that resonated with the socially progressive and reformist

Victorians.

Victorian humanism reached the height of its glory after the First World War

with the creation of the League of Nations. The League was a de facto culmination of

the global governance structures that Dunant and his fellow humanists had pioneered: it

offered collective security and efforts to disarm; pioneered the WHO, ILO, and

UNESCO; introduced committees on opium eradication, and women and child

trafficking; established a Permanent Court of International Justice; and, through the

Mandate System, an institutional form for civilizing colonial peoples.32 Statesmen of the

time variously described the League as an “effective guardian of international right and

international liberty throughout the world”33 (Lloyd George), a “great caravan of

29 Quoted in The Colonial Legacy in France: Fracture, Rupture, and Apartheid (Indiana University Press, 2017), 138.

30 David Theo Goldberg, “Neoliberalizing Race,” Macalester Civic Forum 1, no. 1 (2009): 78.31 Goldberg, 79.32 Hopgood, The Endtimes of Human Rights, 42.33 Quoted in The League of Nations in Retrospect / La Société Des Nations: Rétrospective: Proceedings

of the Symposium Organized by The United Nations Library and The Graduate Institute of International Studies, Genève, 6-9 November 1980 / Actes Du Colloque Organisé Par La Bibliothèque

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humanity”34 (Jan Smuts), and an “attempt to begin building a world society.”35

Nonetheless, and as Hopgood righty notes, underlying this enthusiasm was “a

determination to maintain the structures of power that were integral to the European

imperial project.”36 In the words of Mark Mazower, the League was an “eminently

Victorian institution” designed to carry out a “global civilizing mission through the use

of international law.”37

The outbreak of the Second World War temporarily hampered this project. The

ICRC, which controversially had refrained from denouncing the Holocaust (a result of

its principle of impartiality), was said to have lost its moral compass. Others, such as

E.H. Carr, went further by arguing that utopian humanist thinking had been complicit in

creating the conditions that led to the outbreak of war. While the years following the end

of the war saw the creation of an impressive array of new institutions and conventions—

including the Geneva Conventions of 1949, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,

the International Military Tribunals at Nuremberg and Tokyo, and the idea of crimes

against humanity (genocide) as justiciable international law—humanism and ethics

receded into the background.38 As the global contest between the superpowers built up

and Europe lost its empire, other internationalist visions flourished, calling, amongst

other things, for decolonisation and the creation of emancipated nations in the Third

World; for “socialism with a more human face” in the Soviet Union; for world

revolution and the spread of Soviet-style communism; and for social democracy and an

end to hollow consumerism and middle class conformity in the West.39 As Immanuel

Wallerstein has argued, the years 1945-68 was a period of remarkable success for these

movements:

“Third International parties came to power, by one means or another, in a series of countries more or less contiguous to the U.S.S.R. (eastern Europe, China, North Korea). Second International parties (I use the term loosely, including in this category the Democratic Party in the United States as Roosevelt reshaped it) came to power (or at least

Des Nations Unies et l’Institut Universitaire de Hautes... (Walter de Gruyter, 1983), 146.34 Quoted in Hopgood, The Endtimes of Human Rights, 43.35 Charles Howard Ellis, The Origin, Structure & Working of the League of Nations (The Lawbook

Exchange, Ltd., 1929), 19.36 Hopgood, The Endtimes of Human Rights, 43.37 Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United

Nations (Princeton University Press, 2009), 21.38 Samuel Moyn even suggests that when human rights were popularised in the 1970s, they “emerged...

seemingly from nowhere”. Moyn, The Last Utopia, 3.39 Moyn, 3.

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achieved droit de cité, that is, the right of alternance) in the western world (western Europe, North America, Australasia). Nationalist or national liberation movements came to power in most formerly colonized areas in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, the Caribbean, and in somewhat different forms in long-independent Latin America.”40

Yet these internationalisms would not last long. Already by the mid-1970s political

moralism had begun to resurface, first as a critique of (Soviet) totalitarianism, and later,

as a new imperative to bring democracy, development, and human rights to the Third

World. To understand how and what made this possible, we need to consider a series of

moments, contexts, and events that crystallise around the global revolts of 1968 and

their aftermaths—including the transformation of the old Left and the retreat from

organised politics; the global defeat of anti-imperialism; the American search for a new

moral vocabulary after the Vietnam failure; and the globalisation of neoliberal

capitalism. As we shall see, just like Victorian moralism had been a response to the

historical transformations that led to the 1848 revolutions, so the turn to cosmopolitan

ethics in the latter half of the 20th century was a latent—and indeed—conservative

response to the revolts that shook the world in 1968.

The Turn to Ethics: 1968 and the Transformation of the Left

From Paris to Prague, Berlin to Berkeley, Madrid to Mexico City, in 1968 mass

protests swept the world: in the United States, protests focused on imperialism,

militarism, and racism, against the background of the Vietnam War and the continued

denial of civil liberties to African-Americans41; in Spain and Brazil, students and

workers protested against military dictatorship; in Czechoslovakia, protestors took to the

streets as more than 200,000 troops of the Warsaw Pact entered the country to put an

end to the Prague Spring reforms and “socialism with a human face”; in Calcutta,

students protested against inequality, overcrowding, and poverty, as well as the legacies

of British colonialism; in Dakar, students, labour union members, and unemployed

citizens protested against the betrayals of the postcolonial state; in Mexico City an

estimated 300 to 400 protestors were killed by military and police. The ongoing national

40 Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein, Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays on the Changing World-System (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 69.

41 As Max Elbaum documents, in 1968 more American college students (20%) identified with Che Guevara than with any of the candidates for the US presidency. A New York Times survey from 1971 indicated that 40% of all students thought that a revolution was needed in the US. See Max Elbaum, “What Legacy from the Radical Internationalism of 1968?,” Radical History Review 82, no. 51 (2002): 37.

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liberation struggles in the global South were, by many, seen as the cutting edge of what

was a worldwide revolutionary movement. As Max Elbaum documents, “it was a time

when the Vietnamese and Cuban Revolutions, People's China, and Marxist-led armed

movements in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East appeared to mesh into

one unstoppable torrent.”42 In the global North, the most spectacular of these revolts was

the May 1968 protest in France. What began as a spontaneous and sometimes

carnivalesque student revolt again against capitalism, consumerism, and imperialism

soon spread to a massive general strike. At the height of its fervour, 11 million workers

—corresponding to roughly 22% of the French population—went on strike for two

weeks, bringing the economy to a virtual standstill and giving political leaders reason to

fear civil war and revolution.43 Importantly, and as Wallerstein has argued, the 1968

protests were “simultaneously a cri de coeur against the evils of the world-system and a

fundamental questioning of the strategy of the old left opposition to the world-

system.”44 That is, the revolts were targeting both the capitalist world system as well as

the old Lefts throughout the world. These had not only failed to challenge the capitalist

system but had also created alternative state structures with devastating consequences.

As Wallerstein explains, by 1968 the old Lefts “were no longer to be considered 'part of

the solution.' Rather, they had become 'part of the problem.'”45

Scholars such as Julian Bourg, Michael Scott Christofferson, and Antonio

Vázquez-Arroyo have analysed how the protests of 1968 radically transformed the

European intellectual Left. While the protests in the short term revived the politics of

class struggle and equality, in the long term they fuelled a shift from revolutionary

fidelity to ethical orientations. As Vázquez-Arroyo explains, “[f]rom 1968 on, in both

Germany and France the language of ethics became the favored nomenclature to frame

and deal with political questions.”46 Ethics, of course, had not been wholly absent before

1968—thinkers such as Albert Camus had long argued for a humanist ethics of non-

violence. Nonetheless, after 1968 ethics would increasingly come to replace the concept

of revolution in French and German thought. Widespread disappointment and frustration

42 Elbaum, 38.43 For a good overview of the 1968 protests, see Elaine Carey and Alfred J. Andrea, Protests in the

Streets: 1968 Across the Globe (Hackett Publishing, 2016).44 Giovanni Arrighi, Terence K. Hopkins, and Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein, Antisystemic Movements

(Verso, 1989), 101.45 Immanuel Wallerstein, “1968, Revolution in the World-System,” Theory and Society 18, no. 4 (July 1,

1989): 435, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00136434.46 Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo, Political Responsibility: Responding to Predicaments of Power

(Columbia University Press, 2016).

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with the failure of 1968 to effect immediate social change led many French intellectuals

to doubt the tenets of historical materialism. As Bourg has shown, the ethos of May

1968 entailed a rejection of all law except the Marxist “revolutionary laws of history

(class struggle, the proletariat as historical agent, violence as the handmaiden to

revolution and so forth).”47 When the revolution faded, doubts about these laws of

history began to set in. In 1973 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago was

published, detailing the horrors of the Soviet labour camps. While the book revealed

nothing new—the Gulag camps were not unknown, and testimonies from Trotsky,

Victor Serge, and others were both available and read in France—it was to play an

important role in discrediting Marxist thought and organized radical politics. Under the

banner of “New Philosophy”, thinkers such as Bernard-Henri Lévy and André

Glucksmann began to equate Marxism with the Soviet Gulag, and revolutionary politics

with totalitarianism.48 Lévy explained that Solzhenitsyn had awoken them “from a

dogmatic sleep” by tracing the crimes of Stalinism to “the one he dares to denounce for

the first time—the founding father in person, Karl Kapital and his holy scriptures.”49 In

place of the Marxist dream of historical transformation, New Philosophy emphasised

the importance of ethical thought and action; not the political ethics of Sartre and

Beauvoir, but Kant's ethics of individual responsibility and Lévinas's ethics of alterity.

In Barbarism With a Human Face, Lévy outlined an ethical project based on the defense

of human rights, the primacy of the individual, and the critique of the political; “the only

successful revolutions have been totalitarian”, he argued, and as such “we no longer

have politics, a language, or a recourse. There remain only ethics and moral duty.”50

Glucksmann similarly argued for the need to break with politics and revolutionary

visions. In The Master Thinkers he asserted that the writings of Fichte, Hegel, Marx,

and Nietzsche had been a pre-condition for the Holocaust, the Gulag, and the Chinese

Cultural Revolution; “the sixty million deaths of the gulag are the logical application of

47 Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics.48 Kristin Ross summarises the prevailing sentiment as “revolution = communism = totalitarianism.”

Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (University of Chicago Press, 2008), 152. Nonetheless, and as Christofferson explains, “in ideological debates of the late 1970s, the gulag was less a revelation than a metaphor, the one word that could represent and legitimize the emerging radical repudiation of communism and revolutionary politics.” Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970’s (Berghahn Books, 2004), 90.

49 Bernard Henri Lévy, Barbarism with a Human Face (Harper & Row, 1980), 154.50 Quoted in Tamara Chaplin, Turning On the Mind: French Philosophers on Television (University of

Chicago Press, 2007), 152.

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Marxism.”51 By connecting the critique of revolutionary politics with the ethics of

human rights, New Philosophy was thus able to give old anti-communist themes a new,

libertarian cloak. In the autumn of 1977, they were introduced to the wider public

through a Time Magazine cover-story declaring that “Marx is dead!” As a group of

young, handsome, and anti-Marxist French intellectuals, their arguments “chimed

perfectly with the American ideals of free enterprise and individualism.”52

While the turn to ethics was spearheaded by thinkers such as Glucksmann and

Lévy, it was not unique to New Philosophy. As Richard Wolin has shown, thinkers such

as Sartre also concluded that “fraternity could no longer be produced by 'politic.' From

Robespierre to Lenin to Mao, the political dreams of the Left had all been stillborn. Its

new guarantor was ethics.”53 A variety of thinkers—ranging from Derrida to Deleuze to

Foucault—soon came to embrace ethics. Derrida would draw on Lévinas to demonstrate

that deconstruction could be understood as an ethical practice; Foucault turned to Greek

philosophy to derive an ethics based on “care of the self”; and Deleuze argued for an

immanent ethics. By the early 1980s, the idea that was once so central to the French

Left—namely, that history unfolds according to the dialectic of revolution and

counterrevolution—had been largely abandoned, with nearly everyone championing the

priority of ethics over politics. Anti-Marxism was prominent, leading Perry Anderson to

declare Paris—which had been the capital of the European Left after WWII—the

“capital of European reaction.”54 Bourg summarises this remarkable transformation

when he notes that

“the Cold War ended in Paris before the Berlin Wall fell. Remarkably, radical politics had provided some of the most important resources for overcoming radical politics: Marxism was present at its own funeral.”55

The German experience of 1968 was markedly different from the French one;

yet here, too, ethical theorising emerged victorious. While students and workers in Paris

had rebelled against the autocratic style of de Gaulle, the young Germans who came to

be known as the “1968 generation” or the Achtundsechziger saw themselves as rebelling

51 Quoted in Michael Scott Christofferson, “Foucault and New Philosophy: Why Foucault Endorsed André Gluckmann’s The Master Thinkers,” in Foucault and Neoliberalism, ed. Daniel Zamora and Michael C. Behrent (John Wiley & Sons, 2016), 186.

52 Dominique Lecourt, The Mediocracy: French Philosophy Since the Mid-1970s (Verso, 2002), 61.53 Richard Wolin, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy

of the 1960s (Princeton University Press, 2012), 226.54 Quoted in Christofferson, French Intellectuals Against the Left, 1.55 Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics.

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against Nazism and the complicity of their parents in the Nazi crimes. As Hans

Kundnani explains, “[w]hereas young people in some other countries were driven by a

dream of creating a better society, in West Germany they were driven by a nightmare.”56

The German 1968, he argues, was first and foremost a reckoning with “the Auschwitz

generation.” Unlike France, 1968 was therefore “a moral movement before it was a

political one.”57 Yet like France, the following decade would see an intellectual retreat

from the historical materialism of Marx and Marxism, and a philosophical turn towards

abstraction and intrasubjectivity.58 As Lecourt concluded, “[t]he return to morality

unquestionably correspond[ed] to the retreat of the political vision of the world that had

crystallized around the idea of revolution.”59

At the same time that French and German intellectuals were retreating from

revolutionary critique into ethical theorising, dissidents in the Soviet Union enacted

their own ethical turn. The Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968

demonstrated that “socialism with a human face” would not be tolerated by Moscow. In

its wake many dissidents began to argue for a shift from politics to ethics. As Andrei

Sakharov, the influential Soviet dissent and co-founder of the Committee on Human

Rights in the Soviet Union, explained:

“I am convinced that under the conditions obtaining in our country a position based on morality and law is the most correct one, as corresponding to the requirements and possibilities of society. What we need is the systematic defense of human rights and ideals and not a political struggle, which would inevitability incite people to violence, sectarianism, and frenzy. I am convinced that only in this way, provided there is the broadest possible public disclosure, will the East be able to recognize the nature of our society; and that then this struggle will become part of a word-wide movement for the salvation of all mankind. This constitutes a partial answer to the question of why I have (naturally) turned from world-wide problems to the defense of individual people.”60

56 Hans Kundnani, Utopia Or Auschwitz?: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust (Columbia University Press, 2009).

57 Kundnani, 11.58 Jürgen Habermas, who grew up in Nazi Germany and witnessed the brutalities of the Nazi regime,

offers a striking example. As several commentators have noted, Habermas's attempt to reconstruct Enlightenment arguments for reason and universalism can be understood as an attempt to provide the normative foundations capable of protecting democratic societies from Germany's dark past. Discourse ethics is ultimately a solution to the question: “How can we guarantee that Nazism and the Holocausts will never happen again?” Similar to New Philosophers such as Glucksmann and Lévy, Habermas's search for universal foundations is based on the idea that “in the face of soiled utopias in politics, a nonpartisan morality exist... outside and above them.” Moyn, The Last Utopia, 132.

59 Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics, 9. See also Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives, 12.60 Moyn, The Last Utopia, 139.

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Sarkhov's belief in the primacy of ethics was echoed by other Soviet dissidents. Key

figures such Anatoly Yakobson, Pavel Litvinov, and Yuri Orlov similarly argued that

politics had failed and that dissidence from now on had to take the form of “a moral

struggle” based on an “ethics common to all humanity.”61 As Vaclav Havel argued, there

was a danger in “overestimat[ing] the importance of direct political work in the

traditional sense”62; what was needed, rather, was an internationally defined morality

capable of transcending politics.

On the other side of the Atlantic, human rights was quickly becoming a publicly

acknowledged buzzword. The publication of John Rawls's Theory of Justice in 1971

sparked a renewed interest in individual rights in the Anglophone world. While Rawls

himself restricted his analysis to the nation-state, others liberal thinkers such as Ronald

Dworkin, Thomas Scanlon, and Charles Beitz soon began to theorise the meaning and

nature of international human rights. In 1977 Jimmy Carter was inaugurated as

President of the United States, promising a new, moralised foreign policy with human

rights as its leitmotif: “Because we are free, we can never be indifferent to the fate of

freedom elsewhere. Our moral sense dictates a clear-cut preference for those societies

which share with us an abiding respect for individual human rights.”63 Increasingly,

human rights were seen as part of the political ideology of modern liberalism, together

with democracy, rule of law, and free markets. As Hopgood has shown, this

development was a result of elite mobilisation rather than domestic social movement:

human rights were rarely invoked by American citizens, but was “foreign policy for

non-Americans.”64 Most importantly, and as congressman Donald Fraser explained,

human rights provided a way for “the United States [to] feel better about itself” after

“the trauma of the Vietnam War.”65 Following Carter's inauguration, the Ford

Foundation and other philanthropies began to pour money into human rights initiatives,

funding amongst other things the creation of the Helsinki Watch (later Human Rights

Watch) and the pioneering Columbia University Centre for the Study of Human Rights.

At the same time social movements also began to embrace the language of human

rights. In 1977 Amnesty International was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its work to

“contribute to the implementation, in every country, of the principles of the Declaration

61 Quoted in Moyn, 136.62 Quoted in Moyn, 162.63 Quoted in Peter Van Ness, Debating Human Rights: Critical Essays from the United States and Asia

(Routledge, 2003), 263.64 Hopgood, The Endtimes of Human Rights, 97.65 Barbara J. Keys Keys, Reclaiming American Virtue (Harvard University Press, 2014), 5.

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of Human Rights.”66 As Jan Eckel has argued, this represented a clear break with the

essential elements of earlier forms of activism; rather than “changing 'the system'”

Amnesty limited itself to making “the world a slightly less wicked place.”67 Like the

New Philosophy sweeping across the European continent, the human rights activism of

the 1970s must thus be seen as “the product of a post-revolutionary idealism, growing

out of a certain disillusionment about the preceding decade's attempts to bring about

political change and jettisoning some of the highest hopes and most optimistic tones

which had underlain them.”68 However, although human rights were said to offer a “new

morality” beyond the logics of Cold War power politics, in reality they frequently

functioned as a weapon in the ideological war against communism. As the global

struggle against colonialism came to an end in the 1970s, human rights would

increasingly begin to travel South, joining hands with discourses of development,

democracy-promotion, and humanitarianism. What had begun as a turn to ethics and

critique of totalitarianism would soon take the shape of a new white man's burden.

The Humanitarian Melodrama: 1989 and the Rediscovery of the Third World

At the twentieth anniversary of May 1968, Bernard Kouchner, co-founder of

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), appeared in a French television program entitled “Le

Procès de Mai” (The Trial of May). The event is recounted by Kristin Ross in May '68

and Its Afterlives. Ross explains how Kouchner, who in 1968 had been a militant in the

Union des Etudiants Communistes, begins the program by praising the '68 generations'

“daring to dream.” His tone of self-satisfaction quickly switches to a posture of self-

criticism as he goes on to describe how

“'we [the '68 generation] were navel-gazing, we forgot the outside world, we didn’t see what was happening in the rest of the world, we were folded in on ourselves.' He continues, much more triumphantly: 'We didn’t know what we would discover only in the following years: the third world, misery.'”69

As Ross explains, Kouchner goes on to

66 See https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1977/press.html67 Quoted in Moyn, The Last Utopia, 147.68 Moyn, 147.69 Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives, 156.

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“[i]n one fell swoop... assume the power to clear away an entire dimension of the movement: its relation to anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles in places like Vietnam, Algeria, Palestine, and Cuba. A whole world disappears—the war in Vietnam, the iconography of Che, Mao, and Ho Chi Minh... which is to say a militant or combative third world, so that another can be heroically 'discovered' years later: the third world as figured in the Human Rights discourse, of which Kouchner has by that time emerged as one of the principal spokesmen.”70

Ross's analysis reveals how, by the early 1980s, the ethical turn had begun to go global.

To understand how and why intellectuals, activists, and policymakers “rediscovered” the

Third World as an (un)ethical space, we need to consider two events: first, the defeat of

the global struggle against colonialism and, second, the globalisation of neoliberal

capitalism.

The Third World was not a place but a project, so Vijay Prashad reminds us.

Pursued by a group of recently decolonised states between the mid-1950s and the early

1980s, the Third World project was an attempt to disrupt the global hegemonic order

and its continued organisation around relations of race and colour. In Hedley Bull's

classical formulation, it was a “revolt against the West”71 that championed new norms of

racial equality, economic justice, and cultural liberation. The term the “Third World”

was coined by the French economic historian Alfred Sauvy in 1952, invoking not only

an alternative to the First and Second Worlds but also the Third Estate of the French

Revolution. As Rahul Rao has explained, the implication seems to have been that,

similar to workers and the bourgeoisie in the French Revolution, the newly decolonised

states would play a crucial role in transforming the prevailing global order.72 While the

roots of this project precede the era of decolonisation,73 it was given concrete form at the

1955 Afro-Asian Conference held in Bandung, Indonesia. Attended by 29 Asian and

African countries—which, as Rajagopal notes, was of “the then total world number of

fifty-nine”—Bandung symbolised a “new spirit of solidarity of the Third World”74 and a

collective challenge to the racial structuring of world politics. In Robbie Shilliam's

70 Ross, 156.71 Hedley Bull, “The Revolt Against the West,” in Great Power Relations, World Order, and the Third

World, ed. SisirGupta et al. (Vikas, 1981).72 Rahul Rao, Third World Protest: Between Home and the World (OUP Oxford, 2010), 25.73 Early manifestations of what later would become known as the Third World project can arguably be

found in the 1920 Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East and the 1927 conference of the League Against Imperialism at Brussels, the Communist Internationals, and the numerous Pan-African Congresses held in the first half of the twentieth century. See Rao, 25.

74 Balakrishnan Rajagopal, International Law from Below: Development, Social Movements and Third World Resistance (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 74.

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formulation, Bandung was ultimately an attempt by which “the hinterlands of the

(post)colonized proposed to break free from the global architecture laid by the

colonizer.”75 The agenda centred on a loose set of goals summarised by Prashad as a call

for “peace, bread, and justice”; peace, understood as cooperation against the arms race

between the superpowers; bread, meaning a renegotiation of the economic relationship

between the Third and First Worlds; and justice, entailing a more democratic

international order and better representation of Third World interests at the decision

making table at the IMF, World Bank, GATT, and the UN Security Council. The Third

World project reached its peak with the oil crisis of 1972, when OPEC member states

proclaimed an oil embargo in protest of states supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur War.

The embargo momentarily demonstrated the power of Third World solidarity in

upending the terms of global trade. Spurred by this confidence, in 1974 the Declaration

of a New International Economic Order (NIEO) was put forward to the United Nations

Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). The proposal entailed a series of

global reforms that codified many of the Third World's long-standing demands,

including sovereign debt relief, increased foreign aid, and preferential trade agreements.

In hindsight, this was the high point of the Third World project; a decade later it

was dead. While it was hampered by a range of factors—including lack of democracy in

some of the new nations, mismanagement of economic resources, and a set of

problematic assumptions that sometimes reproduced rather than challenged the logic of

the coloniser76—it was not these limitations that caused its demise. As Prashad details in

The Poorer Nations, “[w]hat did it in was the Atlantic project.”77 The Atlantic project,

he argues, was a co-ordinated effort by the G7 powers to advance a project of neoliberal

restructuring launched by “the propertied classes to maintain or restore their position of

dominance.”78 The project was multi-pronged and involved a variety of strategies,

including a new intellectual agenda based on the revival of laissez-faire economics and

75 Robbie Shilliam, “Colonial Architecture or Relatable Hinterlands? Locke, Nandy, Fanon, and the Bandung Spirit,” Constellations 23, no. 3 (September 1, 2016): 426, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12163.

76 As Robbie Shilliam has shown, the paradox of the Third World project was “that it took the key method of self-determination from blueprints of the masters’ architecture: the enabling institution was to be the nation-state; and the process was to be development or modernization.” See Shilliam, 426. See also Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Legacies of Bandung: Decolonization and the Politics of Culture,” in Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives, ed. Christopher J. Lee (Ohio University Press, 2010); Heloise Weber and Poppy Winanti, “The ‘Bandung Spirit’ and Solidarist Internationalism,” Australian Journal of International Affairs 70, no. 4 (July 3, 2016): 391–406, https://doi.org/10.1080/10357718.2016.1167834.

77 Vijay Prashad, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (Verso Books, 2013).78 Prashad, 47.

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the Hayek school of liberalism; a revamping of international institutions such as the

IMF and the World Bank, as well as key United Nations organisations, and a

replacement of old Keynesians and developmentalists with monetarists; and—most

crucially—a manipulation of the international debt crisis of the 1980s to “open up the

countries of the South to the factories of the North.”79 At the Uruguay Round of the

GATT, a new intellectual property and trade regime was introduced, making reverse

engineering or transfer of technology illegal: “The North and its business would be able

to outsource the production of commodities to the South, but the bulk of the profits for

their sale would be preserved as rent for intellectual property.”80 Deregulation, good

governance, structural adjustments, balanced budgets, and fiscal responsibility were the

pillars of the new era, “a North-led International Property Order” rather than “a South-

led New International Economic Order.” “Trade, not aid” became the mantra of the new

order, as Reagan chided those who “mistake compassion for development and claim

massive transfers of wealth somehow will produce new well-being.”81 Development, he

argued, would be achieved not through regulation or redistribution but by “free people”

building “free trade.”

Discourses of human rights, humanitarianism, and democracy were not external

to this development. Quite the opposite: the language of moralism emerged as a solution

to the postwar era's racial contradictions laid bare by the Third World project. As Jodi

Melamed has shown, anticolonial and antiracist movements politicized “the depth and

injustices of Western and white supremacy”, demonstrating the hypocrisy of European

powers and the United States which

“claimed to be fighting an antiracist and antifascist war [WW2], while practicing racism and fascism against people of color in the United States, Europe, and the colonies... These movements condemned Western imperialisms and recognized white supremacy as an illegitimate and artificial ideology of white and European domination. As the terms of the ideological Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union jelled, racism in the United States and other Western capitalist societies became one of the chief propaganda weapons in the Soviet

79 As Prashad makes clear, the problem was not the debt itself but the power asymmetries built into international financial institutions: “These are not 'poor' countries. Over the course of (the past) three decades, the sixty states (have) paid USD550 billion in principle and interest on loans worth USD540 billion. Yet the still owe USD523. The alchemy of international usury binds the darker nations.” Prashad, 276.

80 Vijay Prashad, “Dream History of the Global South,” Interface: A Journal for and about Social Movements 4, no. 1 (2012): 48–9.

81 Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (Henry Holt and Company, 2006), 186.

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Union’s arsenal. In order to define successfully the terms of global governance after World War II, U.S. bourgeoisie classes had to manage the racial contradictions that antiracist and anticolonial movements exposed.”82

The language of ethics, human rights, and development emerged as solutions to these

contradictions, as they provided a way to safeguard the moral legitimacy of US global

leadership in a postcolonial world. As moralism replaced the critique of political

economy, not only did race disappear as “a referent for the inequality of the historical

development of modern capitalism.” The struggle against inequality, poverty, and

racism “now explicitly required the victory and extension of US empire.”83 Political

moralism thus rose to power in the very moment that hopes of a new economic world

order were abandoned: the humanitarian utopia was effectively one that took both US

ascendancy and global capitalism for granted.

This link between ethics, empire, and global capitalism was clearly recognised

by the Mont Pelerin Society, whose founding members include Friedrich Hayek, Milton

Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, and Karl Popper. In its founding statement, the group

sought to counter what they perceived as “an ideological movement” threatening “the

central values of civilization” with “intellectual argument” centred on “absolute moral

standards” such as human dignity, the rule of law, and private property.84 That these

views were embraced by neoliberal economists might not be surprising, yet by the early

1980s they had become commonplace on the Euro-American Left. As Neil Lazarus has

shown, after 1975 the prevailing political sentiment in the West “turned sharply against

anticolonial nationalist insurgency and revolutionary anti-imperialism.”85 New

Philosophers such as Glucksmann and Lévy increasingly began to extend their critiques

of totalitarianism to the “tyrannical” and “bloodthirsty” Third World state. The former

colonies, they argued, had in the wake of decolonisation reverted back to their former,

precolonial state of savagery and barbarism. As Jacques Julliard explained, “[i]t is true

that there are two opposing sides in the third world. But they aren't the American and

the Soviet sides. They are those of the torturing State and the martyred people.”86 The

82 Jodi Melamed, “The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism,” Social Text 24, no. 4 89 (December 21, 2006): 4, https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-2006-009.

83 Melamed, 6.84 “Statement of Aims | MPS,” accessed October 14, 2017, https://www.montpelerin.org/statement-of-

aims/.85 Neil Lazarus, “What Postcolonial Theory Doesn’t Say,” Race & Class 53, no. 1 (July 1, 2011): 3–27,

https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396811406778. See also Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

86 Quoted in Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives, 160. See also Julian Bourg, “From the Left Bank to Libya:

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European Left, he went on to argue, must denounce “power” in the Third World, and aid

the victims of famine, flood, and authoritarian state apparatuses. Julliard's remarks are

indicative of a discursive shift that had begun to take hold of intellectual life in the late

1970s. In the previous two decades many on the Left had looked to the Third World's

struggle against imperialism and neo-colonialism, as well as to the writing of Frantz

Fanon, Che Guevara, and Mao Tse Tung, as a model for Western emancipatory thinking;

Sartre's preface to The Wretched of the Earth is a typical example of the spirit of this

time. With the global defeat of anti-imperialism, and a harshening critique of the Third

World state, a new regime of representation began to take hold: no longer a

revolutionary leading the way towards worldwide emancipation, the Third World

subject was reconstituted as a victim—of overpopulation, famine, flooding, poverty,

illiteracy, and so on—urgently in need of Western help.87 As Ross explains, the colonial

or Third World other of the 1960s was ultimately “transformed from militant and

articulate fighter and thinker to 'victim' by a defense of human rights strictly identified

as the rights of the victim, the rights of those who do not have the means to argue their

rights or to create a political solution to their own problems.”88 The result was a

humanitarian sensibility and modern-day version of Victorian humanism, emblematised

by Kouchner's MSF, which reanimated the moral discourse of the civilising mission and

the rhetoric of European civilization versus non European barbarism.89 After the Biafra

War, Kouchner had left the ICRC which, he argued, took the principle of neutrality to

the point of complicity; “By keeping silent we doctors [are] accomplices in the

systematic massacre of a population.”90 With the foundation of MSF in 1971 he

inaugurated a new era of humanitarianism, grounded in the principle of témoignage—

the French term for testimony, witnessing, and bearing witness. New humanitarianism

The New Philosophy and Humanitarianism,” in Human Rights and Humanitarian Intervention: Legitimizing the Use of Force since the 1970s, ed. Annette Weinke, Norbert Frei, and Daniel Stahl (Wallstein Verlag, 2017), 95.

87 As Michael Barnett explains, “Against the backdrop of a newly decolonizing world, many nongovernmental organizations that once had concentrated on Europe now discovered a whole world waiting to be helped.” Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Cornell University Press, 2011), 2. See also Eleanor Davey, Idealism beyond Borders: The French Revolutionary Left and the Rise of Humanitarianism, 1954–1988 (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

88 Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives, 167. As Arif Dirlik explains, “Within a decade, the 'South' had turned from a possible savior of the world to an object of compassion that must be saved in order for the world to save itself.” Arif Dirlik, Global Modernity: Modernity in the Age of Global Capitalism (Routledge, 2015), 14.

89 See Paige Arthur, Unfinished Projects: Decolonization and the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (Verso, 2010), xxiv.

90 Quoted in Daniel Robert DeChaine, Global Humanitarianism: NGOs and the Crafting of Community (Lexington Books, 2005), 70.

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successfully drew together intellectuals from all sides of the political spectrum and was,

as Glucksmann explained, “the end of the cold war in our heads.”91 A heterogeneous

configuration of intellectuals—including Foucault, Barthes, Sartre, and Aron—in 1979

came together to endorse MSF's campaign for a “Boat for Vietnam.”92 The campaign

was a striking symbol of the new intellectual consensus. Sartre and Aron, who had taken

opposing positions on almost every issue since their break in 1947, now found

themselves brought together over the issue of Vietnamese refugees. The famous

photograph from the press conference captures this new, post-ideological consensus; as

described by Paul Berman, the picture shows “Sartre side by side with the conservative

Aron and a Beatle-haired Glucksmann—three men, representing the old-fashioned left,

the old-fashioned conservatives, and the new-fashioned younger generation, all of them

united in solidarity with the victims of Vietnamese Communism.”93

Importantly, new humanitarianism was in many ways a media affair.

Glucksmann, Lévy, and Kouchner rode the wave of the rapid shift from a literary to

media culture, and made extensive use of print, radio, and television media to spread

their message.94 As Ilan Kapoor rightly notes, the new humanitarian principle of

witnessing was, after all, “about witnessing not just on behalf of disaster victims, but

also for the media/public.”95 Through the mediasphere, a new—and highly racialized

and gendered—aesthetic of suffering was popularised, bringing Western audiences into

contact with faraway conflicts, suffering Brown bodies, and innocent starving children.96

These representations were crucial in creating what Meister calls “the humanitarian

melodrama,”97 a morality play between victims, savages, and heroic rescuers. Such

91 Quoted in James Traub, “A Statesman without Borders,” The New York Times, February 3, 2008, sec. World, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/news/03iht-03kouchnert.9691898.html.

92 See D. Drake, Intellectuals and Politics in Post-War France (Springer, 2001), 153–4 and Christofferson, “Foucault and New Philosophy: Why Foucault Endorsed André Gluckmann’s The Master Thinkers.”

93 Paul Berman, Power and the Idealists: Or, the Passion of Joschka Fischer and Its Aftermath (W. W. Norton & Company, 2007).

94 Lévy, perhaps better than anyone else, recognised the power of this new media culture. As the journalist Gaby Wood observes, Lévy often presented himself as a rockstar: “his clothes (open-necked white shirts and designer suits), his friends (Yves Saint Laurent, Alain Delon, Salman Rushdie), his homes (the flat in Saint Germain, a hideaway in the South of France, an eighteenth-century palace in Marrakesh that used to belong to Jean Paul Getty) are endlessly commented on.” Gaby Wood, “Je Suis Un Superstar,” The Observer, June 15, 2003, sec. Books, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/jun/15/society.

95 Ilan Kapoor, Celebrity Humanitarianism: The Ideology of Global Charity (Routledge, 2012), 92.96 One of the earliest examples of the link between the television and humanitarianism is the Nigerian

Civil War, which drew considerable attention among Western audiences. See Lasse Heerten, The Biafran War and Postcolonial Humanitarianism: Spectacles of Suffering (Cambridge University Press, 2017), 6; Jan Eckel and Samuel Moyn, The Breakthrough: Human Rights in the 1970s (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 130.

97 Robert Meister, After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights (Columbia University Press, 2012), 66.

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narratives both drew inspiration from and helped reinforce what in the 1970s was

becoming a metanarrative about the Holocaust. While modern-day human rights are

often considered as the logical culmination of forces that where unleashed in the

aftermath of the Second World War, throughout the 1950s and 60s there was a lack of

widespread consciousness about the Holocaust. As Peter Novick has argued, it was only

with the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 that the Holocaust was introduced to the public

lexicon, giving it “the transcendent status as the bearer of eternal truths or lessons that

could be derived from contemplating it.”98 The killing of six million Jews (alongside

Roma, ethnic Poles, gay men, political dissidents, and so on) became the holocaust and

then The Holocaust; a narrative that no longer focused on Jewish suffering per se, but on

the suffering endemic to humanity. As the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union

collapsed, the old discourse of revolution and counterrevolution, which had been so

central to the Left since 1789, had largely been superseded by a humanitarian sentiment

focusing on suffering. In many ways this was the logical conclusion of the processes

that had been set in motion in 1968, culminating in a humanist ideology not very

different from that of the Victorians in the long 19th century. For some, such as

American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, the crumbling of the Berlin Wall thus

constituted much more than the end of the bifurcation of the international sphere: it also

signalled “the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of

Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”99 As a new (but in

some respects, old) era dawned on the post-1989 world, the discourse of human rights,

humanitarianism, and international law would soon rise to hegemony in the global

North. In Alain Badiou's formulation, this is why “the reign of 'ethics' coincides, after

decades of courageous critiques of colonialism and imperialism, with today's sordid

self-satisfaction in the 'West,' with the insistent argument according to which the misery

of the Third World is the result of its own incompetence, its own inanity—in short, of its

subhumanity.”100

Conclusion

In this chapter I have argued that cosmopolitan political theory is a historically

produced discourse, anchored in particular material interests and relations of power.

98 Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000), 110. See also S. Slabodsky, Decolonial Judaism: Triumphal Failures of Barbaric Thinking (Springer, 2014).

99 Francis Fukuyama, End of History and the Last Man (Simon and Schuster, 2006), xi.100 Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (Verso, 2002), 13.

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Where cosmopolitan theorists typically insist on a distinction between ethics and

politics, ontology and history, I have argued that cosmopolitanism is a politically

produced discourse that, similar to Victorian humanism in the 19th century, contributes

to an ideological formation that gives legitimacy to the unjust, racialized global order.

The rise of cosmopolitan thinking in the 1990s is less a result of a steady, gradual climb

towards global justice, and more a product of a set of historical and material conditions

that in the late 20th century made it highly desirable for policymakers, activists, and

intellectuals to think of world politics as an ethical space. The global defeat of the

counterrevolutions to colonialism and capitalism, the transformation of the old Left, the

American search for a new moral vocabulary after Vietnam, the globalisation of

neoliberal capitalism, and the invention of a mediatised aesthetic of suffering: these

were the social forces that propelled the rise of cosmopolitan thinking in the late 20th

century.

Samuel Moyn has argued that the rise of human rights and cosmopolitan

political theory in the latter part of the 20th century depended on the collapse of other,

prior internationalism such as Marxism and anti-colonial nationalism. Against those

who depict history as a “dramatic struggle for human rights across the ages, from the

Mesopotamian Codes of Hammurabi to today’s globalization era”,101 Moyn argues that

history in fact “left open diverse paths into the future, rather than paving a single road

toward current ways of thinking and acting.”102 While Moyn is right to place the

resurgence of cosmopolitanism in the context of the demise of other internationalisms,

the story he tells is ultimately one that preserves the innocence of cosmopolitanism: as

other internationalisms “imploded” and “collapsed”, Moyrn suggests, a vacuum was left

behind that cosmopolitanism hesitantly and involuntarily came to fill. In depicting

cosmopolitanism as the reluctant heir to past and prior utopias, Moyn therefore cannot

explain why it was cosmopolitanism—and not any other internationalism—that rose to

hegemony in the late 1980s. In contrast, in this chapter I have argued that

cosmopolitanism contributes to an ideological formation that helps to legitimise,

perpetuate, and entrench the current world order. The end of the Cold War marked not

so much the beginning of a new global era as a return to the North-dominated global

order of 1492-1945. As the global counterrevolutions to colonialism and capitalism

came to an end and other internationalisms were brutally blocked, the ethical discourses

101 Micheline R. Ishay, The History of Human Rights: From Ancient Times to the Globalization Era (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2008), book cover.

102 Moyn, The Last Utopia, 5.

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that in the long 19th century had legitimised the colonial enterprise returned but in

updated form. The result was a turn to Victorian humanist ideas about the white man's

burden, and a consequent transformation of the meaning of solidarity. As Kant displaced

Marx, and discourses of empathy and suffering superseded the language of struggle and

liberation, solidarity would increasingly come to be associated with ethics—and not the

revolution.

This shift from political economy to the language of moralism has also had

pronounced effects on postcolonial theory. As we shall see in the next chapter, the

erasure of political economy as a means of understanding and critiquing the global

colour line has led to an overwhelmingly focus on questions of cultural identity,

Eurocentrism, and representations of Self/Other—ultimately framing race as a question

of “difference” rather than “domination.” The project of radicalising and decolonising

solidarity thus requires—as a first step—that the problem of the global colour line be

rethought through a materialist lens. It is to this that we now turn.

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C H A P T E R 3

The Political Economy of Race: Rethinking the Global Colour Line

“If their blood has not mingled extensively with yours, their labour power has long since entered your economic blood stream. It is the sugar you stir, it is in the sinews of the infamous British sweet tooth, it is the tea leaves at the bottom of the British cuppa.”

—Stuart Hall1

Introduction

In her classic essay from 1979, self-described “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior,

poet” Audre Lorde argued that “the master's tools will never dismantle the master's

house.”2 Calling on white feminists to confront their racism and homophobia, she asked:

“What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow parameters of change are possible and allowable.”3

While the master's tools “may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game”, Lorde

concluded, “they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”4

In this chapter I build on Lorde's provocation to examine what a radicalised and

decolonised solidarity might look like and mean—beyond the “master's tools.” How can

the theory and practice of internationalist solidarity be reimagined anew, and what

would it mean for international political theory to take seriously the racial ordering of

world politics? In what follows I argue that answering these questions requires, as a first

step, that the nature and problem of the global colour line be rethought. In postcolonial

1 Quoted in Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, EMPIRE STRIKES BACK: Race and Racism In 70’s Britain (Routledge, 2004), 283.

2 Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press, 1984), 110.3 Lorde, 110–111.4 Lorde, 112.

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theory, within as well as outside of IR, the racial ordering of the international has

predominantly been framed as a problem of cultural difference, Eurocentrism, and

representations of the imperial Self and the colonial Other.5 While this focus has been

successful in bringing certain features of the global colour line into view, it has also left

other aspects to the side—in particular, the material and socioeconomic dimensions of

race and racism. As Andrew Sartori has argued, postcolonial scholarship has often let

“the representational order” take “precedence in the analytical sequence”, thus eliding

the question of the materiality of colonial relations.6 By conceiving of colonialism in

purely civilisational terms, and Eurocentrism as a mainly cultural force, the

entanglements between the racialized social order, global empire, and capital

accumulation have often tended to fade from view. The result, as Arif Dirlik has argued,

has been “a disassociation of questions of culture and cultural identity from the

structures of capitalism, shifting the grounds for discourse to the encounter between the

colonizer and the colonized, unmediated by the structures of political economy within

which questions of culture had been subsumed earlier.”7 Consequently, while many IR

5 Indicatively, see John M. Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics : Western International Theory, 1760-2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (University of Chicago Press, 1999); Duncan Bell, Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire (Princeton University Press, 2016); Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton University Press, 2009); Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Duke University Press, 2011). To be clear, many postcolonial scholars do emphasise that colonialism often involved different forms of coerced labour and resource extraction; what is missing from this literature, rather, is any kind of deeper analysis of how capital accumulation, race, and physical violence are intwined. As Ince points out, “this ignominious record congeals into an undifferentiated mass of 'imperial' violence that liberal thinkers then rationalize or criticize.” See Onur Ulas Ince, Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism (Oxford University Press, 2018), 16.

6 Andrew Sartori, “The British Empire and Its Liberal Mission,” The Journal of Modern History 78, no. 3 (2006): 632, https://doi.org/10.1086/509149. This critique is of course not true for all postcolonial scholars. See, for example, Lisa Tilley and Robbie Shilliam, eds., “Special Issue: Raced Markets,” New Political Economy 0, no. 0 (December 21, 2017): 1–10, https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2017.1417366; John Narayan, “The Wages of Whiteness in the Absence of Wages: Racial Capitalism, Reactionary Intercommunalism and the Rise of Trumpism,” Third World Quarterly 38, no. 11 (November 2, 2017): 2482–2500, https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2017.1368012; Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton University Press, 2000).

7 Arif Dirlik, “Rethinking Colonialism: Globalization, Postcolonialism, And The Nation,” Interventions 4, no. 3 (January 1, 2002): 432, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801022000013833. See also Neil Lazarus, “What Postcolonial Theory Doesn’t Say,” Race & Class 53, no. 1 (July 1, 2011): 3–27, https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396811406778; Benita Parry, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (Routledge, 2004); Sandro Mezzadra, “How Many Histories of Labour? Towards a Theory of Postcolonial Capitalism,” Postcolonial Studies 14, no. 2 (June 1, 2011): 151–70, https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2011.563458; Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (Verso Books, 2013); Ince, Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism; Satnam Virdee, “Challenging the Empire,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 37, no. 10 (August 24, 2014): 1823–29, https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2014.932408; Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus, Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2002). For an account of empire as

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theorists recall W.E.B. Du Bois's famous statement, that “[t]he problem of the Twentieth

Century is the problem of the color line”, few have realised that Du Bois, in the later

stages of his life, became convinced that the problem of the global colour line is a

question of political economy:

“Here then is the fundamental question of our day: How far can nations who are at present most advanced in intelligence... and technique keep their wealth without using the land and labor of the majority of mankind mainly for the benefit of the European world and not for the benefit of most men, who happen to be colored?”8

For Du Bois, who sought to reveal the “continuities between prewar colonial capitalism

and postwar U.S. global ascendancy and expanding transnational capitalism”,9 it was

clear that anti-racist politics had to be anti-capitalist.

In this chapter I take up Du Bois's call for a global political economic critique of

race and racism. The project of radicalising and decolonising solidarity, I argue, must

begin with rethinking the global colour through a materialist lens. Drawing on Cedric

Robinson's 1983 magnum opus Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical

Tradition, this chapter reconceptualises the global colour line as a racial ontology that

enables the hyper-exploitation of non-white peoples and lands, while privileging others.

Building on Robinson's concept of racial capitalism, I demonstrate how race-making

practices are constitutive of the logic of capital. The history of capitalism began with the

slave trade and not with the factory system; in fact, and as Black Marxism demonstrated,

there was never such a thing as capitalism without slavery, and “the history of

Manchester never happened without the history of Mississippi.”10 In contrast to

an explicitly capitalist endeavour, see Steven Press, Rogue Empires: Contracts and Conmen in Europe’s Scramble for Africa (Harvard University Press, 2017); Ince, Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism.

8 Quoted in Jodi Melamed, “The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism,” Social Text 24, no. 4 89 (December 21, 2006): 11, https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-2006-009.

9 Melamed, 13.10 Walter Johnson, “To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Justice,” Text, Boston

Review, October 19, 2016, https://bostonreview.net/race/walter-johnson-slavery-human-rights-racial-capitalism. See also Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California Press, 2007); Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin, Futures of Black Radicalism (Verso Books, 2017); Robin D. G. Kelley, “What Did Cedric Robinson Mean by Racial Capitalism?,” Text, Boston Review, January 12, 2017, http://bostonreview.net/race/robin-d-g-kelley-what-did-cedric-robinson-mean-racial-capitalism; Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Duke University Press, 2015); Jodi Melamed, “Racial Capitalism,” Critical Ethnic Studies 1, no. 1 (2015): 76–85, https://doi.org/10.5749/jcritethnstud.1.1.0076; David Roediger, Class, Race and Marxism (Verso Books, 2017); Robin D. G. Kelley, “Introduction,” in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, by Cedric J. Robinson, 2000.

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conventional Marxist thinking, Robinson's work thus points to the necessity of

understanding race and class as co-constitutive. As Lisa Lowe explains, the concept of

racial capitalism captures “that capitalism expands not through rendering all labor,

resources, and markets across the world identical, but by precisely seizing upon colonial

divisions, identifying particular regions for production and others for neglect, certain

populations for exploitation and still others for disposal.”11 Race, then, is neither

reducible to class, nor is it a separate form of oppression. Instead, capitalism relies upon

the elaboration, reproduction, and exploitation of racial difference: on the invention of

what Robinson called “the universal Negro.” Capitalism is ultimately racial, not merely

because people racialized as non-white are disproportionately impacted and

disadvantaged by the “free” market, although this is true as well12; more fundamentally,

racial differences are constitutive of capitalism because processes of capital

accumulation are themselves predicated on the devaluation of Black and other non-

white people. Hence the term racial capitalism.

By centre-staging the political economy of race and racism, this chapter lays the

foundations for my larger project of radicalising and decolonising solidarity. In chapter

4, I show that a materialist reading of the global colour line, and a consequent focus on

interlocking oppressions under racial capitalism, open up space for a different kind of

internationalism and politics of solidarity, beyond the “master's tools.” The immediate

aim of the the present chapter, then, is to interrogate what a rematerialised conception of

the global colour looks like and means.

The chapter unfolds in three sections. In the first section I undertake a close

reading of Black Marxism to put forward a global political economic critique of race

and racism. Contra Marxist orthodoxy, Robinson helps us understand that racism is a

constitutive feature of capital accumulation, as opposed to a mere residue of pre-

capitalist social relations. In the second section I extend this discussion by putting Black

Marxism in dialogue with feminist theory and activism. Unraveling the centrality of

sexuality and gender differences to racial capitalism, I argue that the regulation of

intimacy and female reproductive labour is central to the process of capital

accumulation. In the third and final section I examine how the rise of neoliberalism has

led to a reconfiguration of the global colour line. Racialized and gendered forms of

domination continue to pattern global politics but have, as we shall see, evolved to take

11 Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents.12 For example, see Akwugo Emejulu and Leah Bassel, “Minority Women, Austerity and Activism,”

Race & Class, October 2, 2015, https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396815595913.

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on new forms, fit for the postcolonial and multicultural present.

Racial Capitalism and the Global Colour Line

When Black Marxism first appeared in 1983 it drew little attention. “It was badly

received”, remembers Elizabeth Robinson, the wife of Cedric Robinson, and sometimes

“not received at all.”13 With its focus on capital and the production of racial difference, it

started from coordinates that increasingly were seen as marginal and suspicious. With

the global defeat of the counterrevolutions to colonialism and capitalism, the

transformation of the old (Euro-American) Left, and the rising hegemony of

postmodernism and “Theory”, research on race and racism was undergoing a distinct

shift, from critiques of political economy towards questions of cultural identity; from

“the theory and politics of inequality and redistribution” towards “the theory and

politics of recognition and understanding difference.”14 Political economy was no longer

the focus of research on race, as it once had been for Black radicals such as Du Bois,

C.L.R. James, Oliver Cromwell Cox, Eric Williams, Stuart Hall, Robert Miles, and A.

Sivanandan. As Kunkel recalls, in this period, and especially after 1989, “it often

seemed easier to spot the contradictions of Marxism than the more famous

contradictions of capitalism.”15 Black Marxism was thus, at least to some extent,

impossibly out of tune with its times. And still, the text survived: it traveled with

Robinson's students, colleagues, and friends, found a home in activist circles, and was

finally republished in 2000. Fred Moten, who came into contact with the text during

graduate school, remembers how

“for a long time... it circulated underground, as a recurrent seismic event on the edge of or over the edge of the university, for those of us who valorized being on or over the edge even if we had been relegated to it. There, at least, we could get together and talk about the bomb that had gone off in our heads. Otherwise we carried around its out, dispersive potenza as contraband, buried under the goods that legitimate parties to exchange can value, until we could get it to the black market, where (the) license has no weight, and hand it around out of a suitcase or over a kitchen table or from behind a makeshift counter.”16

13 Johnson and Lubin, Futures of Black Radicalism, 103.14 Virdee, “Challenging the Empire,” 1827. As Dirlik explains, postcolonial scholarship has been

“overtaken by cultural nationalisms of one kind or another that take for granted the existing system of political economy and fight out their battles on the grounds of culture.” Dirlik, “Rethinking Colonialism,” 442.

15 Benjamin Kunkel, “Into the Big Tent,” London Review of Books, April 22, 2010.16 Fred Moten, “The Subprime and the Beautiful,” African Identities 11, no. 2 (May 1, 2013): 239,

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35 years after its publication, Black Marxism remains one of the most incisive

commentaries on the relationship between racism and capitalism. With its focus on the

global political economy of race, it steps into what Walter Mignolo has described as

Marxism's “colonial fracture.”17 Where Marx had missed “the colonial mechanism of

power underlying the system he critiques”18, Black Marxism challenges “the hegemonic

imperial macro-narratives” that privileged the Euro-American proletariat as the

revolutionary class of history. In its place it centres the Black radical tradition, “the

colonial territories, marginalized colored people of the metropolitan centres of capital,

and those Frantz Fanon identified as the 'wretched of the earth.'”19 Echoing Audre

Lorde, Robinson revealed why the master's tools would never dismantled the master's

house; and in its place, he examined what would.

Robinson, of course, was not the first thinker to put a spotlight on the link

between race and class. Black Marxism drew inspiration from a long tradition of

scholarship—including the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, Oliver Cromwell Cox, Claudia

Jones, Angela Davis, Eric Williams, Walter Rodney, and Stuart Hall—who had held

Black radicalism and organised Marxism in uneasy yet productive tension.20 Hall's

https://doi.org/10.1080/14725843.2013.797289.17 Walter D. Mignolo, “Delinking,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2 (2007),

https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162647. Anthony Bogues describes this as a Black radical heretical practice, through which Black radicals sought to expose Marxism's incompleteness when it came to the non-white and colonial world. As Bogues explains, black heretics entailed “a double operation—an engagement with Western radical theory and then a critique of this theory.” Anthony Bogues, Black Heretics, Black Prophets: Radical Political Intellectuals (Routledge, 2015), 13.

18 Mignolo, “Delinking,” 483.19 Kelley, “Black Marxism,” xii.20 In recent years a growing body of scholarship have examined how Black radicalism developed as a

conversation with, and critique of, Marxist theory and practice. See, indicatively, Hakim Adi, Pan-Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa and the Diaspora, 1919-1939 (Africa World Press, 2013); Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Duke University Press, 2008); Dayo F. Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War (NYU Press, 2012); Cheryl Higashida, Black Internationalist Feminism: Women Writers of the Black Left, 1945-1995 (University of Illinois Press, 2011); Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (UNC Press Books, 2015); Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939 (Univ of North Carolina Press, 2011); Erik S. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Duke University Press, 2011). Sylvia Wynter's apt description of C.L.R. James captures the uneasy yet productive relationship between Black radicalism and Marxims. James, she argues, was “a Negro yet British, a colonial native yet culturally a part of the public school code, attached to the cause of the proletariat yet a member of the middle class, a Marxian yet a Puritan, an intellectual who plays cricket, of African descent yet Western, a Trotskyist and Pan-Africanist, a Marxist yet a supporter of black studies, a West Indian majority black yet an American minority black.” For Wynter, these sides of James should not be seen as contradictions or antagonisms, but rather as parts of a unified whole. James refused to choose between “either race of class, proletariat or bondsman labor, or damnes de la terre, Pan-African nationalism or labor internationalism.” Instead, “[t]he quest for a frame to contain them all came” to constitute the essence of James's scholarship.

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theory of articulation, in particular, opened up space for a non-reductionist

understanding of race; race, Hall argued, is not epiphenomenal to capitalist development

but a structuring relation. Yet where Hall and others sometimes had fallen back on an

easy separation between the materiality of class and the ideology of race, Robinson

refused the distinction altogether: race, he argued, is neither reducible to class, nor is it a

separate form of oppression. Instead, capitalism relies upon the elaboration,

reproduction, and exploitation of racial difference: on the invention of what he called

“the universal Negro.” Capitalism has historically operated through racial projects that

assign differential value to human life and labour. Marxism, with its valorisation of the

proletariat as the universal subject of history, thus failed to grasp that wage labour is not

the only form of exploitation on which capitalism depends and thrives. Unwaged and

less-than-free labour—such as chattel slavery, racialized indentured servitude, convict

leasing, debt peonage, and gendered forms of caring work and reproductive labour—are

not just incidental to capital accumulation, but fundamental to its operations. Colonial

land grabs, the transatlantic slave trade, native dispossession, and armed trading had

historically tied Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa into a differentiated but unified

whole; indeed, “from its very foundations capitalism had never been—any more than

Europe—a 'closed system.'”21

Black Marxism arrives at this conclusion through a close study of one of

Marxism's key premises: namely, that capitalism emerged as a revolutionary negation of

feudalism. Rejecting this idea, Robinson instead charts how capitalism evolved from a

European feudal order that was already infused with racialism:

“The bourgeoisie that led the development of capitalism were drawn from particular ethnic and cultural groups; the European proletariats and the mercenaries of the leading states from others; its peasants from still other cultures; and its slaves from entirely different worlds. The tendency of European civilization through capitalism was thus not to homogenize but to differentiate—to exaggerate regional, subcultural, and dialectical differences into 'racial' ones. As the Slavs became the natural slaves, the racially inferior stock for domination and exploitation during the early Middle Ages, as the Tartars came to occupy a similar position in the Italian cities of the late Middle Ages, so at the systemic interlocking of

Quoted in Cyril Lionel Robert James, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live in (UPNE, 1953), x.

21 Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, 2 edition (Chapel Hill, N.C: University North Carolina Pr, 2000), 4. See also Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents; Anibal Quijano and Michael Ennis, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla: Views from South 1, no. 3 (November 1, 2000): 533–80.

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capitalism in the sixteenth century, the peoples of the Third World began to fill this expanding category of a civilization reproduced by capitalism.”22

While European colonialists would come to associate non-waged labour with Indians,

Blacks, and mestizos,23 Robinson shows how the racialization of the labouring classes in

fact begun within Europe, long before Europe's colonial encounter with the global

South. The first European proletarians were racial subjects—including the Irish, Slavs

(the slaves), Roma, and Gypsies—and they were subject to dispossession, enclosure,

and slavery within Europe.24 Alongside “indentured peasants, political outcasts produced

at varying times by national and civil wars, and poor or orphaned females”25, Irish

immigrant workers formed a particularly important element in the English working

class; in 1841, there were 400.000 Irish immigrants livings in Great Britain, constituting

“the cheapest labour in Western Europe.”26 Consequently, and as Robinson makes clear,

“The English working class was never the singular social and historical entity suggested by the phrase... The negations resultant from capitalist modes of production, relations of production, and ideology did not manifest themselves as an eradication of oppositions among the working classes. Instead, the dialectic of proletarianization disciplined the working classes to the importance of distinctions: between ethnics and nationalities; between skilled and unskilled workers; and... in even more dramatic terms, between races. The persistence and creation of such oppositions within the working classes were a critical aspect of the triumph of capitalism.”27

While racial ideologies justified low wages and mistreatment, they were—importantly

—not invented by the emergent bourgeoisie; rather, racialism already saturated

European civilisation, and thus came to shape “the process of proletarianization and the

formation of working-class consciousness.”28 In other words, capitalism was less a

22 Robinson, Black Marxism, 26.23 As Quijano points out, from the very beginning of the colonisation of America, Europeans associated

non-paid or unwaged labor with Indigenous peoples because they were “inferior” races. Quijano and Ennis, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” 538.

24 Robinson, Black Marxism, 3. As Robinson explains, racism “was not simple a convention for ordering the relations of Europeans to non-European peoples but has its genesis in the 'internal' relations of European peoples.” Kelley, “Black Marxism,” 2.. See also Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

25 Robinson, Black Marxism, 116.26 E.P. Thompson, quoted in Robinson, 39.27 Kelley, “Black Marxism,” 42.28 Kelley, xiii. As Kelley explains: “Capitalism was 'racial' not because of some conspiracy to divide

workers or justify slavery and dispossession, but because racialism had already permeated Western feudal society.”

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negation of the feudalist social order, than the global extension of it; in essence, and as

Robin D.G. Kelley explains, capitalism and racism “did not break from the old order but

rather evolved from it to produce a modern world system of 'racial capitalism' dependent

on slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide.”29 The creation of raced—and, as we

shall see in the next section, gendered—subjects organised the capitalist social order by

splitting humanity into those associated with property, citizenship, and wages, and those

subjected to superexploitation and dispossession.

Marx, of course, was not unaware of the problems posed by this racial world

order. He condemned both colonialism and slavery, and called on workers to oppose

racism. Nonetheless, by bracketing racial violence as a form of “so-called primitive

accumulation”—and, thus, as something that belongs to a separate historical era—he

neglected to interrogate the link between racial difference and the logic of capital.

Rather than a process that is integral to capital accumulation, racism, for Marx, was an

embarrassment residue of pre-capitalist social relations.30 In his famous formulation,

“The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things that characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation.”31

Consequently, while Marx condemned colonialism, he ultimately thought that capitalism

bore little responsibility for the trade in human bodies, the theft of Indigenous lands and

resources, and the colonial genocides committed in the name of Western civilisation.

Capital may come into the world “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with

blood and dirt”32 but, he argued, it manages to clean up its act. In contrast, in Black

Marxism Robinson theorised racial violence as a permanent, rather than anterior,

condition of capital accumulation.33 To consign slavery to a pre-capitalist era, Robinson

29 Kelley, xiii.30 Marx's notion of primitive accumulation describes the foundational process through which non-

capitalist forms of land and labour are incorporated into capitalist social relations. In recent years David Harvey has tried to update this concept; nonetheless, while this work is driven by an interest in questions relating to what Harvey terms the “new imperialism”, race and gender both remain curiously absent from the analysis. See David Harvey, The New Imperialism (OUP Oxford, 2003).

31 Quoted in Nikhil Pal Singh, Race and America’s Long War (Univ of California Press, 2017), 82.32 Quoted in David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital (Verso Books, 2010), 300.33 In recent years a number of theorists have argued that Marx in fact took a great interest in questions of

colonialism, imperialism, and slavery, as well as the revolutionary efforts to abolish and overthrow them. See Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western

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argued, is to overlook that “the Atlantic slave trade and the slavery of the New World

were integral to the modern world economy.”34 Indeed, “[f]or more than 300 years slave

labor persisted beyond the beginnings of modern capitalism, complementing wage labor,

peonage, serfdom, and other method of labor coercion.”35 Plantation slavery, territorial

expropriation, social displacement, militarised trading, indentured servitude, and

resource extraction were all established and organised as building blocks of the global

capitalist market. As Robinson concludes, “[f]rom whatever vantage point one chooses,

the relationship between slave labor, the slave trade, and the weaving of the early

capitalist economies is apparent. Whatever were the alternatives, the point remains:

historically, slavery was a critical foundation for capitalism.”36

Crucially, then, and in contrast to Marx's expectation that bourgeois society

would eradicate racism from social relations, “the development, organization, and

expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions.”37 Violent forms of

labour exploitation such as slavery, sharecropping, and indentured servitude are not

incidental to capitalism. Rather, capital differentiates between free and less-than-free

labour, according to racial, national, ethnic, and—as we shall see, gendered—

hierarchies. As Chris Chen elaborates, “[t]he history of capitalism isn't simply the

history of the proletarianisation of an independent peasantry but of the violent racial

domination of populations whose valorisation as wage labour, to reverse a common

formulation, has been merely historically contingent: 'socially dead' African slaves, the

revocable sovereignty and terra nullius of indigenous peoples, and the nerveless,

Societies (University of Chicago Press, 2016); Robin Blackburn, ed., An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln (London ; New York: Verso, 2011). And indeed, at moments Marx did recognise the centrality of slavery to capitalism; he argued that “the veiled slavery of the wageworkers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world”; that “the business of slavery is conducted by capitalists”; and that “direct slavery is just as much the pivot of the bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that has given the colonies their value; it is the colonies that have created world trade, and it is world trade that is the precondition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance.” And yet, in spite of this, Marx consistently failed to develop a theory of the relation between slavery and capitalism. For a thorough critique of Marx's treatment of race, slavery, and colonialism, see Singh, Race and America’s Long War, 87.

34 Robinson, Black Marxism, 4. See also Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Hachette UK, 2016); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2014); Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Harvard University Press, 2009); Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Lulu Press, Inc, 2015).

35 Robinson, Black Marxism, 4.36 Robinson, 116 . For a similar argument on the colonial appropriation of Indigenous lands see Glen

Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Duke University Press, 2018).

37 Kelley, “Black Marxism,” 2.

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supernumerary body of the coolie labourer.”38 Contra Marxist orthodoxy, capitalism did

not create the European proletariat as a universal subject. Rather, capitalism emerged—

and continues to operate—through racial projects that assign differential value to human

life and labour. Race-making practices are intrinsic to capital accumulation, because

racism supplies the precarious and exploitable lives capitalism needs to extract land and

labour. In Jodi Melamed's formulation,

“Capital can only be capital when it is accumulating, and it can only accumulate by producing and moving through relations of severe inequality among human groups—capitalists with the means of production/workers without the means of subsistence, creditors/debtors, conquerors of land made property/the dispossessed and removed. These antinomies of accumulation require loss, disposability, and the unequal differentiation of human value, and racism enshrines the inequalities that capitalism requires.”39

In other words, there can be no capitalism without racializations: hence racial

capitalism.

The concept of racial capitalism helpfully highlights the underlying materiality

of the global colour line. In contrast to postcolonial scholars that predominantly have

focused their analysis on questions of Eurocentrism, representation, and cultural

difference, Robinson's analysis encourages us to take seriously the historical and

ongoing global political economy of race and racism. The production of racial (and

gendered) differences is ultimately how capital manages the contradiction “between the

promise of political emancipation and the conditions of economic exploitation.”40 As

Silvia Federici explains,

“capitalism, as a social-economic system, is necessarily committed to racism and sexism. For capitalism must justify and mystify the contradictions built into its social relations—the promise of freedom vs. the reality of widespread coercion, and the promise of prosperity vs. the reality of widespread penury—by denigrating the 'nature' of those it exploits: women, colonial subjects the descendants of American slaves, the immigrants displaced by globalization.”41

38 Chris Chen, “The Limit Point of Capitalist Equality,” Endnotes 3, accessed May 13, 2018, https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/3/en/chris-chen-the-limit-point-of-capitalist-equality.

39 Melamed, “Racial Capitalism,” 77.40 Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Duke University Press, 1996), 23.41 Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia,

2004), 17.

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Before exploring how these structures continue to pattern global politics, we must first

account for the role of gender and sexuality in racial capitalism.

Reproductive Racial Capitalism

Black Marxism has rightly been praised for bringing anti-racist, anti-imperialist,

and anti-capitalist critiques into productive conversation. It has, however, also faced

criticism for being an overtly masculine text.42 Critics have called out Robinson for

centre-staging the work of three male thinkers—Du Bois, C.L.R. James, and Richard

Wright, as opposed to, say, Ella Baker, Sojourner Truth, or Ida B. Wells—and for eliding

the question of gender and sexual differences.43 In what follows I argue that Robinson's

work, in spite of these blindspots, can be put into fruitful dialogue with feminist theory

and activism. As we shall see, doing so not only unravels the ways in which the

regulation of intimacy and female reproductive labour is central to the process of capital

accumulation; it also pushes us to take seriously the role of gender in producing and

reproducing the global colour line.

Women of colour feminists such as Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James,

Claudia Jones, Maria Mies, Angela Davis, and the Combahee River Collective have

highlighted the various ways in which the home and housework function as foundations

of the capitalist social order.44 In their influential The Power of Women and the

Subversion of the Community from 1972, Dalla Costa and James challenged the idea

that sexism (like racism) is a residue of pre-capitalist social relations. The exploitation

of women, they argued, is central to the process of capital accumulation. Through their

household work and other forms of unwaged work, women are the producers and

reproducers of capitalism's most crucial commodity: namely, labour-power. Anticipating

Robinson's insight that capital depends on the existence of a large pool of workers who

42 For example, see H. L. T. Quan, “Geniuses of Resistance: Feminist Consciousness and the Black Radical Tradition:,” Race & Class, June 30, 2016, https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396805058081.

43 In an interview with Christina Heatherton and Jordan T. Camp, Robinson admits to having left out the question of gender from the analysis in Black Marxism. It should be noted that Robinson's other books, most crucially, An Anthropology of Marxism, do offer an extensive discussion of women's activism, including that of Fanny Lou Hamer and Ella Baker. See Christina Heatherton and Jordan T. Camp, “The World We Want: An Interview with Cedric and Elizabeth Robinson,” in Futures of Black Radicalism, ed. Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (Verso, 2017).

44 See, indicatively, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (Falling Wall Press Ltd, 1975); Davies, Left of Karl Marx; Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (Zed Books Ltd., 2014); Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, & Class (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011); Combahee River Collective, The Combahee River Collective Statement: Black Feminist Organizing in the Seventies and Eighties (Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1986).

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stand outside of the formal wage relation, Dalla Costa and James demonstrated how the

home is one of the pillars of capitalist social relations.45 Next to the slave, colonial

subject, coolie, and wageless worker, they thus added another unwaged figure: the

proletarian housewife, who reproduces the workforce. The division between “gender”

and “class”, they concluded, is ultimately a false dichotomy: “women's history” is a

form of “class history”, because gender names a specific form of class relation, rather

than a cultural norm or biological reality.

In Caliban and the Witch, the Italian feminist Marxist thinker Silvia Federici

builds on these insights to rethink the concept of primitive accumulation from a feminist

perspective. Examining “the execution of hundreds of thousands of 'witches' at the

beginning of the modern era”, she interrogates why “the rise of capitalism demanded a

genocidal attack on women.”46 The construction of a new sexual division of labour,

confining women to reproductive work, required that the “world female subject” be

destroyed: “the heretic, the healer, the disobedient wife, the woman who dared to live

alone, the obeha woman who poisoned the master's food and inspired the slaves to

revolt.”47 By destroying the control that women had exercised over their reproductive

function, the persecution of witches paved the way for a more oppressive patriarchal

regime. The witch-hunt, Federici concludes, was ultimately “as important as

colonization and the expropriation of the European peasantry from its land were for the

development of capitalism.”48

In recent years a growing body of scholarship has highlighted the ways in which

the intimate sphere of sexuality, desire, and reproductive labour were central to

colonialism and New World slavery. In her influential Carnal Knowledge and Imperial

Power, Ann Laura Stoler demonstrates how “gender-specific sexual sanctions and

prohibitions” were crucial for establishing and securing the categories of coloniser and

colonised. Focusing on parents and parenting, nursing mothers, servants, orphanages,

and abandoned children, she shows how the “troubled intimacies of domestic space”

were essential to imperial governance; “[r]ace was a primary and protean category for

colonial capitalism and... managing the domestic was crucial to it.”49 Similarly, and as

45 Costa and James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community. See also Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale.

46 Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, 14.47 Federici, 11.48 Federici, 12.49 Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule

(University of California Press, 2002), 13. See also Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915 (Univ of North Carolina Press, 2000);

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thinkers such as Angela Davis, Jennifer Morgan, and Saidiya Hartman have shown,

gendered racial violence was one of the pillars of the system of New World racial

slavery: slaveowners relied on African captive women, not only for unpaid productive

labour, but also for their reproductive capacities. The appropriation of Black women's

reproductive labour, Christina Sharpe writes, “turns the womb into a factory

reproducing blackness as abjection and turning the birth canal into another domestic

middle passage.”50 Slaveowners effectively conscripted the womb for their own

financial gain; they “'coupled' men and women, named them husband and wife, and

foresaw their own future in the bellies of enslaved workers.”51

By reading gender and sexuality into racial capitalism, this diverse array of

thinkers unravel the ways in which the regulation of intimacy and women's reproductive

labour is crucial to the functioning of the “free” market. Neither race nor gender are

accidental features of the global capitalist order, but are constitutive and central to its

survival and reproduction. In the next section I consider how the rise of neoliberalism

has reconfigured the global colour line. As we shall see, racialized and gendered forms

of domination have evolved to taken on new forms, fit for the postcolonial and

multicultural present.

Ghettos, Slums, Favelas: Neoliberalism and the Global Production of Surplus Humanity

Over the last two decades, and especially after the election of America's first

Black President, the idea of the postracial has risen to prominence. Race, it is frequently

claimed, either is or is quickly becoming a thing of the past.52 As David Theo Goldberg

Nayan Shah, Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West (University of California Press, 2012); Philippa Levine, Gender and Empire (OUP Oxford, 2007); Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (UNC Press Books, 2000).

50 Quoted in Saidiya Hartman, “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors,” Souls 18, no. 1 (March 14, 2016): 169, https://doi.org/10.1080/10999949.2016.1162596.

51 Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 105. Hartman similarly concludes: “black women’s domestic labors and reproductive capacities... labor was critical to the creation of value, the realization of profit and the accumulation of capital.” Hartman, “The Belly of the World,” 167. See also Angela Davis, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” The Massachusetts Review 13, no. 1/2 (1972): 81–100; Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” Signs 14, no. 4 (1989): 912–20; Darlene C. Hine, “Female Slave Resistance: The Economics of Sex,” Western Journal of Black Studies, January 1, 1979.

52 Mark Ledwidge, Kevern Verney, and Inderjeet Parmar, Barack Obama and the Myth of a Post-Racial America (Routledge, 2013); N. B. C. News, “Obama: Police Need to Work on Building Trust,” NBC News, April 29, 2015, http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/baltimore-unrest/obama-police-need-work-building-trust-n350501; Tim Wise, Colorblind: The Rise of Post-Racial Politics and the Retreat from

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explains, the “key conditions of social life”, including education possibility,

employment opportunities, and residential location, are increasingly thought to be “less

and less... predicated on racial preference, choices, and resources.”53 In parallel, an

unprecedented number of women have come to occupy positions of power in the

professional-managerial class. As an increasing number of women “lean in” and climb

the corporate ladder, they will achieve the liberation that generations of feminists have

struggled for—at least if one is to believe Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.54 What, if

anything, do these shifting racial-sexual grammars tell us about the current articulation

of the global colour line? Has capital stopped operating through racial and gendered

logics? If not, what has changed and why?

To answer these questions, it is helpful to consider the genealogy of

postracialism. In the previous chapter I traced how the postwar period's anticolonial and

civil rights movements produced a crisis in white supremacy. By exposing the racial

contradictions of European powers and the United States—which had claimed to fight

an antiracist and antifascist war against Germany, while simultaneously practising

racism and fascism against people of colour in Europe, the US, and in the colonies—

these movements successfully discredited white supremacy as official state policy on

both a national and international level. The result was a shift, from overt white

supremacy to what Jodi Melamed calls “racial liberalism.”55 Racial liberalism differs

from white supremacy in so far as it “recognizes racial inequality as a problem” and

“secures a liberal symbolic framework for race reform centered in abstract equality,

market individualism, and inclusive civic nationalism.”56 The shift to racial liberalism

discredited scientific racism with its belief in the inherent biological inferiority of non-

white peoples. In its place, it centre-staged a cultural paradigm which traced the roots of

poverty and inequality to cultural values. The rise of neoliberalism has further

reconfigured this framework: under neoliberalism, the determining factor in an

individual’s life chances is said to be individual choice—as opposed to skin colour, the

relative wealth of the families individuals are born into, and so on. As Ashwin Desai and

Richard Pithouse note, this has led to a delinking of “the classic racial stereotypes

(laziness, dirtiness, dangerous men and willing women etc) that legitimated colonial

Racial Equity (City Lights Books, 2010).53 David Theo Goldberg, Are We All Postracial Yet? (John Wiley & Sons, 2015), 2.54 Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (Random House, 2013).55 Howard Winant, “The Modern World Racial System,” in Transnational Blackness: Navigating the

Global Color Line, ed. M. Marable and Vanessa Agard-Jones (Springer, 2008).56 Melamed, “The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism,” 2.

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domination from race”, and a subsequent projection of “them onto the global poor of all

races in order to legitimate contemporary forms of domination that entrench inequalities

that were previously created in explicitly racist terms.”57 New categories of privilege

and subordination have thus come to blend with older racial categories.

One of the key mechanisms through which this has happened is gender. The

post-war entrance of women into the labour market coincided with the globalisation of

neoliberal capitalism and the international deregulation of markets. As Nancy Fraser

notes, the conscription of women into the paid work force has been essential to the

expansion of low-wage work, with women providing the majority of workers in the

fastest-growing areas of poorly paid employment.58 The new ideal of the modern two-

earner family, she argues, has had the effect of squeezing out time for unpaid carework.

Women who “lean in” are thus forced to lean on other women “by offloading their own

care work and housework onto low-waged, precarious workers, typically racialized

and/or immigrant women.”59

In the neoliberal present neither race nor gender have thus withered away, but

very much continue to structure the social and economic processes of capitalism. As

Melamed explains, “race remains a procedure that justifies the nongeneralizability of

capitalist wealth... organizing the hyperextraction of surplus value from racialized

bodies and naturalizing a system of capital accumulation that grossly favors the global

North over the global South.”60 Under neoliberalism, capitalism's initial division

between free and less-than-free labour—in the form of slavery, serfdom, indentured

servitude, unpaid reproductive labour, and so on—has been systematised and

reconfigured as a racialized division of labour. While the freedoms and rights won by

anticolonial and civil rights movements must not be underestimated, racialized

domination has simultaneously evolved to take on new forms, fit for the postcolonial

and postracial present. In the face of austerity measures and neoliberal restructuring,

capitalism's production of surplus populations has both intensified and reconfigured

57 Ashwin Desai and Richard Pithouse, “‘What Stank in the Past Is the Present’s Perfume’: Dispossession, Resistance, and Repression in Mandela Park,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 4 (September 16, 2004): 848–9.

58 See Nancy Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (Verso Books, 2013).

59 Nancy Fraser and Gary Gutting, “A Feminism Where ‘Lean In’ Means Leaning On Others,” The New York Times, 1444893675, //opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/15/a-feminism-where-leaning-in-means-leaning-on-others/.

60 Melamed, “The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism,” 10; 1.

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itself. Today's surplus populations are not “a reserve army of labour” in Marx's sense—

namely, workers who are hired and fired in times of economic expansion and decline61

—but a growing mass of humanity that are disposable and yet trapped within the capital

relation. Reduced to waste, bare life, and excess, these are the “lumpenproletariat”:

those who exist at the margins of the capitalist economy and “whose plight cannot... be

meaningfully addressed or meaningfully improved within the neoliberal institutions of

global capitalism.”62 According to urban geographer Mike Davis, this outcast proletariat

today amounts to a staggering 1.4 billion people, making it “the fastest growing... social

class on earth.”63 From the ghettos of Los Angeles to the slums in Cairo, the banlieues of

Paris, and the favelas of Rio, the global colour line is quickly being reconfigured and

hardened along lines of free and less-than-free (including unwaged, coerced, and

dependent forms of) labour. As Chris Chen explains,

“At the periphery of the global capitalist system, capital now renews 'race' by creating vast superfluous urban populations from the close to one billion slum-dwelling and desperately impoverished descendants of the enslaved and colonised... As capital sloughs off these relative surplus populations in the core, the surplus capital produced by fewer and more intensively exploited workers in the Global North scours the globe for lower wages, and reappears as the racial threat of cheap labour from the Global South.”64

Neoliberalism, thus, reproduces the global colour line in at least two ways: through the

hyperextraction of surplus value from racialized bodies, as well as—and in conjunction

with—the racialized violence of the penal and national security state. That is, race both

manifests itself as “a probabilistic assignment of relative economic value” and “an index

of differential vulnerability to state violence.”65 This stands in contrast to conventional

interpretations of neoliberalism, which often conceptualise it in terms of a withdrawal of

61 In Capital, Marx described surplus populations as a structural necessity of the capitalist system; the accumulation of capital, he argued, depends on “a relatively redundant working population, i.e. a population which is superfluous to capital’s average requirements for its own valorization, and is therefore a surplus population.” Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Penguin Books Limited, 1976), 782.

62 Michael Cloete, “Neville Alexander: Towards Overcoming the Legacy of Racial Capitalism in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa 86, no. 1 (March 10, 2015): 43, https://doi.org/10.1353/trn.2014.0032. See also McIntyre Michael and Nast Heidi J., “Bio(necro)polis: Marx, Surplus Populations, and the Spatial Dialectics of Reproduction and ‘Race’1,” Antipode 43, no. 5 (June 1, 2011): 1465–88, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2011.00906.x.

63 Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (Verso, 2007), 178.64 Chen, “The Limit Point of Capitalist Equality.”65 Chen.

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the (welfare) state through privatisation and deregulation. While this is true,

neoliberalism also entails a simultaneous roll-out of new forms of state interventionism

and social control. As Stuart Hall and his co-authors demonstrated in their 1978 classic

Policing the Crisis, neoliberalism justifies new ways of regulating class, race, and space

through the construction of “moral panics” and an ideology of crisis, in which tough-on-

crime policies are seen as the only bulwark against the breakdown of social order.66

Policing the Crisis offers a critique of the idea that policing and other forms of state

violence are inevitable reactions to “threats” to public safety. As Hall et al explain, the

penal and national security state emerged as a strategy for “managing” the populations

rendered redundant in relation to capital. The slide to authoritarianism in Britain in the

1970s was less the result of an increase in racialized street crime—“mugging”—than of

an underlying crisis in hegemony, which saw the state struggle to reproduce itself

without “an escalation in the use and forms of repressive state power.”67 Consent to

these repressive measures were won “through race”:

“A crisis of hegemony marks a moment of profound rupture in the political and economic life of a society, an accumulation of contradictions... Such moments signal, not necessarily a revolutionary conjuncture nor the collapse of the state, but rather the coming of “iron times”... Class domination will be exercised, in such moments, through a modification in the modes of hegemony... and the powerful orchestration... of an authoritarian consensus... The forms of state intervention thus become more overt and more direct.”68

In today's neoliberal present, moral panics around race, crime, security, (dis)order, and

law frequently function as legitimating discourses for the state's expanded use of

policing, prisons, and bordering practices. As Loïc Wacquant explains, in neoliberalism

“the 'invisible hand' of the casualized labor market finds its institutional complement

and counterpart in the 'iron fist' of the state which is being redeployed so as to check the

disorders generated by the diffusion of social insecurity.”69 This “iron first” manifests

itself in a variety of contexts and geographies, some which I discuss in my three case

studies: including the mass incarceration and policing of Black and Brown populations

66 Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (Macmillan International Higher Education, 2013). See also Nisha Kapoor, “The Advancement of Racial Neoliberalism in Britain,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 36, no. 6 (June 1, 2013): 1028–46, https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2011.629002.

67 Hall et al., Policing the Crisis, 298.68 Hall et al., 214.69 Loïc Wacquant, “The Penalisation of Poverty and the Rise of Neo-Liberalism,” European Journal on

Criminal Policy and Research 9, no. 4 (December 1, 2001): 401–2, https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1013147404519.

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in the United States, Brazil, and South Africa, counterinsurgency operations in the

Middle East, mass surveillance, and the proliferation of militarised borders alongside

the world's North-South equator. IR theory, with its language of borders, frontiers, and

territorial sovereignty, is ill-equipped to capture this dynamic—characterised, as it is, by

the gradual unravelling of the Westphalian order and the simultaneous proliferation of

hard, militarised borders. The proliferation of penal and national security measures

ultimately constitute a growing “security archipelago”70, designed to protect the wealthy

and powerful from those rendered surplus by the social and economic dislocations of

racial capitalism. For Mike Davis, this is why surplus populations must be considered

“the ghosts at the table of world politics. Every debate about the war on terrorism, the future of the Middle East, the AIDS crisis in Africa, and the international narcotics trade is haunted by their presence and growing desperation. The helicopter gunships that hover over the megaslums of Gaza and Sadr City, the nightly gun battles in the shantytowns of Bogota and Karachi, the bulldozers in Nairobi, Delhi, and Manila—is this not already an incipient world war between rich and poor?”71

In linking the growth of surplus humanity to the neoliberal reordering of the world

economy, Davis gets the broad strokes of the story right. Nonetheless, by centre-staging

the political economy of the global colour line, we can be more precise: in fact, is this

not an incipient world war between the rich and the racialized populations rendered

superfluous by global capital?

Conclusion

In this chapter I have argued that the global colour line is best understood as a

racial ontology that enables the hyper-exploitation of non-white peoples and lands,

while privileging others. In contrast to (postcolonial) scholarship that focuses on

questions of Eurocentrism, representation, and cultural difference, a materialist reading

of the global colour line centre-stages the political economic critique of race and racism.

Unwaged and less-than-free labour—such as chattel slavery, racialized indentured

servitude, convict leasing, debt peonage, and gendered forms of caring work and

reproductive labour—are not just incidental to capital accumulation, but fundamental to

70 Paul Amar, The Security Archipelago: Human-Security States, Sexuality Politics, and the End of Neoliberalism (Duke University Press, 2013).

71 Mike Davis, “Planet of Slums,” Harper’s Magazine, June 2004, https://harpers.org/archive/2004/06/planet-of-slums/.

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its operations. As Aloysha Goldstein summarises,

“Race and gender are not incidental or accidental features of the global capitalist order, they are constitutive. Capitalism emerged as a racial and gendered regime... The secret to capitalism's survival is racism, and the racial and patriarchal state.”72

The neoliberal reordering of the world economy has led to a reconfiguration of these

dynamics: while racialized and gendered forms of domination continue to pattern global

politics, they have evolved to take on new forms, fit for the postcolonial and

multicultural present. How can these processes be challenged? In the next chapter I

show that a materialist reading of the global colour line, and a consequent focus on

interlocking oppressions under racial capitalism, open up space for a different kind of

internationalism and politics of solidarity. In the contemporary era of Trump, Brexit, and

global fascist resurgence—where the “white working class” frequently is juxtaposed

with “immigrants”, and identity politics blamed for the demise of the organised Left—

such an internationalist vision is urgently needed.

72 Aloysha Goldstein, “On the Reproduction of Race, Capitalism, and Settler Colonialism” (Race and Capitalism: Global Territories, Transnational Histories, UCLA Luskin, 2017), 43, https://challengeinequality.luskin.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2018/04/Race-and-Capitalism-digital.pdf.

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C H A P T E R 4

Identity Politics and the Class Struggle: Towards a New Internationalism

“For the vast majority of the planet's peoples, the global economy publicizes itself in human misery. Thus, the simple fact is that liberationist movements abound in the real

world—a reason for attention far more weighty than the self-serving conceits of capitalist triumphalism and incessant chants of globalism followed upon the

disintegration of the Soviet Union.”—Cedric Robinson1

“I think that we have to have a global perspective. We need—we used to call it internationalism... I think we need to create a 21st century internationalism. None of the past struggles in this country, progressive struggles, took place in isolation

from what was happening in the rest of this world... I think we need to begin to think in those terms.”

—Angela Y. Davis2

Introduction

In The Many-Headed Hydra, Peter Linebaugh and Markus Rediker reconstruct

the history of the rise of Atlantic capitalism and the revolutionary movements to which

it gave rise. As the expansion of trade and colonisation launched the world's first global

economy, a vast, landless, and ethnically and racially diverse workforce was born; a

motley crew of African slaves, English convicts, conquered Irishmen, indentured

servants, conscripted sailors, dispossessed commoners, religious radicals, pirates,

witches, and prostitutes. These “planetary wanderers” not only built their own

autonomous, multi-ethnic, and cross-gendered communities on the factory-like ships

that roamed the Atlantic. They also resisted the brutal conditions of the British

transatlantic empire and successfully instigated rebellions ocean-wide. As this “many-

headed hydra” disintegrated, “[w]hat was left behind was national and partial: the

English working class, the black Haitian, the Irish diaspora.”3

What might it mean to reimagine such a motley crew of “planetary wanderers”

in 21st century world politics? In this chapter I argue that a materialist reading of the

1 Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, 2 edition (Chapel Hill, N.C: University North Carolina Pr, 2000), xxviii.

2 “Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Angela Davis on Ferguson, Palestine & the Foundations of a Movement,” Democracy Now!, accessed May 29, 2017, http://www.democracynow.org/2016/3/28/freedom_is_a_constant_struggle_angela.

3 Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the

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global colour line provides answers to this question. An analysis of racial capitalism

demonstrates that different systems of oppression—based on race, class, gender, and so

on—are inherently international and rely on one another in complex ways. While the

struggles against empire, white supremacy, settler colonialism, gender subordination,

and workers' exploitation are not always and everywhere the same, they are

fundamentally interlinked: different fronts of the same war. Where cosmopolitan

scholarship typically understands solidarity as a product of commonality—in short, as

something that arises amongst people and groups that are alike—a focus on racial

capitalism thus opens up space for a different kind of solidaristic politics, centred on an

analysis of how different forms of oppression depend on one another. Racism, sexism,

and classism are not separate forms of oppression that sometimes intersect, but an

entangled and constitutive part of the capitalist global order. This does not deny the

uniqueness and specificity of local struggles; instead, in emphasising their international

character, it points to the importance of connecting—but not unifying—different

struggles, projects, and trajectories into a “many-headed hydra”: a radical

internationalism for the 21st century.

I develop these arguments in three sections. In the first section I provide an

overview of (white) Marxist critiques of identity politics. Scholars such as David

Harvey, Nancy Fraser, and Wendy Brown have insisted on a firm distinction between

identity politics and class struggle, whereby they separate anti-capitalist politics from

the struggle against white supremacy, patriarchy, settler colonialism, and empire. A

materialist reading of the global colour line demonstrates why this separation is

problematic: race-making practices are intrinsic to capital accumulation, because racism

supplies the precarious and exploitable lives capitalism needs to extract land and labour.

In eliding this dynamic, critics of identity politics ultimately take it for granted that there

exists a variety of different oppressions that are separate from (and less important than)

the workers' struggle. The second section challenges this claim by returning to the

original formulation of identity politics as theorised by the Black lesbian feminist

organisation the Combahee River Collective (CRC). Anticipating Cedric Robinson's

analysis in Black Marxism, the CRC showed that a focus on race and gender need not

detract attention from class: quite the opposite, a truly anti-capitalist politics has to be

anti-racist, anti-sexist, and, indeed, internationalist. In the final section I argue that such

an analysis opens up space for a different kind of internationalism. Where cosmopolitan

perspectives often depict solidarity as a one-way street whereby powerful and privileged

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actors extend empathy and charity to silent victims, internationalism thus conceived

figures subalterns as agents in a collective struggle against interlocking systems of

oppression under racial capitalism.

The Colour Line and the Assembly Line

In the late 1960s, a group of working-class white activists called the Young

Patriots formed a class-based, multi-racial coalition with the Black Panther Party in

Chicago. The Patriots consisted of poor white migrants from the Appalachian region in

West Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky that had come to Chicago with the hope of

finding work and a brighter future. The actual Chicago was very different from what

they had dreamed of: a city characterised by slums, poverty, racism, unemployment,

police violence, housing discrimination, and lack of social services. Confined to the

economically deprived Uptown neighbourhood, the Appalachian community struggled

to find jobs and often found itself stuck in day labour, hustling, domestic work, and

social welfare. In this environment, the Patriots organised against the capitalist system

and claimed the white southern's right to self-determination, describing themselves as

“hillbilly nationalists.” They chose the Confederate flag as their symbol and had it

sewed onto their denim jackets and berets—less an endorsement of white supremacy,

which they opposed, and more “a blatant middle finger to the student left”,4 which they

argued was dominated by middle-class students and their contempt for the white poor.

In the 1960s they successfully set up the Rainbow Coalition—the “vanguard of the

dispossessed”—together with the Black Panther Party. In addition to the Panthers and

the Patriots, the Coalition also included the Puerto Rican street-gang-turned-political-

organisation the Young Lords as well as other groups organising poor whites, including

Rising Up Angry and Jobs or Income Now (JOIN). Despite “the seeming contradiction

of confederate flag waving revolutionaries in deep dialogue about Black Power and

Third World Liberation”,5 the Coalition successfully established a string of community

service programs addressing poor people's immediate concerns, including health,

welfare, housing, jobs, drug addiction, and police violence.6 As Amy Sonnie and James

4 Amy Sonnie and James Tracy, Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times (Melville House, 2011), 75.

5 Sonnie and Tracy, 4.6 For a more detailed account of the Rainbow Coalition, see Sonnie and Tracy, Hillbilly Nationalists,

Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power. See also the webpage: “The Young Patriots and the Original Rainbow Coalition,” accessed November 26, 2017, http://www.youngpatriots-rainbowcoalition.org/.

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Tracy recount in Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power, the

Coalition “opened direct links to struggles in communities of color, allowing poor and

working-class whites to participate as actors, not just allies, in the struggle for racial and

economic justice.”7 Kathleen Cleaver, who at the time was one of the leading Panther

figures, remembers how

“In a world of racist polarization, we sought solidarity... We organized the Rainbow Coalition, pulled together our allies, including not only the Puerto Rican Young Lords, the youth gang called Black P. Stone Rangers, the Chicano Brown Berets, and the Asian I Wor Kuen (Red Guards), but also the predominantly white Peace and Freedom Party and the Appalachian Young Patriot Party. We posed not only a theoretical but a practical challenge to the way our world was organized. And we were men and women working together.”8

Five decades later, the Rainbow Coalition—grounded, as it was, in a

understanding of the revolutionary struggle as a specifically cross-racial one—seems

unlikely if not utopian. As Sonnie and Tracy point out, “[t]here's a reason West Side

Story tells a tale of true love tragically divided. Would anyone believe the plot if the

Sharks and the Jets had joined forces to fight the police and open a community health

clinic? Popular history gives us so many of these stories that tales of racial unity seem

romantic at best, propaganda at worst.”9

Why have multi-racial alliances like the Rainbow Coalition come to seem so

impossible? The standard answer typically centres on the rise of identity politics and the

fracturing of old, working class solidarity. As we saw in chapter 2, since 1968 the Euro-

American Left has witnessed an intellectual retreat from the historical materialism of

Marx and Marxism, and a philosophical turn towards questions of human rights, the

primacy of the individual, and the critique of the political. This transformation also gave

rise to new social movements, focused on race, gender, nationality, sexuality, ecology,

and other issues not explicitly expressed in the language of class. As Wendy Brown

explains,

“Where there was once the Movement, there are now multiple sites and modalities of emancipatory struggle and egalitarian protest. Similarly,

7 Sonnie and Tracy, 4.8 Quoted in Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas, Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther

Party: A New Look at the Black Panthers and Their Legacy (Routledge, 2014), 125.9 Sonnie and Tracy, Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power, 7.

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where there was once a millenarian, redemptive, or utopian project around which to organize the various strategies of the political present, such projects have splintered politically at the same time that they have been quite thoroughly discredited by cultural and philosophical critique.”10

Calls for revolutionary social change have, according to Brown, today been “diffused

into local, issue-oriented, or identity-based struggles that generally lack a strong

alternative vision.”11 In short, identity politics has displaced class struggle, and the

colour line has supplanted the assembly line as the central category of political analysis.

Brown's argument is echoed by a number of contemporary thinkers, including Nancy

Fraser, Todd Gitlin, Adolph Reed, Ellen Meiksins Wood, and Slavoj Zizek. Fraser

describes the rise of identity politics as a product of the “renaturalization of capitalism”

which, in her view, has come to characterise Leftist discourse since the 1970s. In this

climate, where “the Right won the political battle and the Left won the cultural war”,12

“cultural domination” has increasingly supplanted “exploitation” as the fundamental

injustice. The result has been a political imaginary centred on notions of “identity”,

“difference”, and “recognition”, and a displacement of the socialist imaginary with its

framing of “redistribution” as the central goal of political struggle. As the “politics of

difference” overtook the “politics of class”, solidarity across divides—such as that

enacted by the Rainbow Coalition—has been rendered increasingly suspicious.

To what extent is this a correct description? Critiques of identity politics are of

course not without their merit. In some versions, identity politics has indeed functioned

as the handmaiden of neoliberalism—exemplified, perhaps most starkly, by Hillary

Clinton's presidential campaign, which adopted the language of “privilege” and

“intersectionality” to combat the left-wing challenge from Bernie Sanders. And yet,

critiques of identity politics all to frequently function to police and gate-keep what

counts as class struggle “proper.” As Stuart Hall and his co-authors argued in Policing

the Crisis, what defines an anti-capitalist movement is not necessarily the issue it

mobilises around.13 In Hall's famous formulation, “[r]ace is the modality in which class

is lived, the medium through which class relations are experienced, the form in which it

is appropriated and fought through.”14 Where Marxist orthodoxy often framed the

10 Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History (Princeton University Press, 2001), 20.11 Brown, 20.12 Rodolfo Torres and Christopher Kyriakides, Race Defaced: Paradigms of Pessimism, Politics of

Possibility (Stanford University Press, 2012), xi.13 Asad Haider, Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump (Verso Books, 2018), 16.14 Stuart Hall, “Race, Articulation, and Socities Structured in Dominance,” in Black British Cultural

Studies: A Reader, ed. Houston A. Baker Jr, Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg (University of

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struggle against racism as a mere precursor to the real, unified working-class struggle,

Hall argued that it in fact is through the experience of race and racialization that some

groups come to “comprehend, handle and then begin to resist the exploitation which is

an objective feature of their class situation.”15 As we saw in chapter 3, race-making

practices are central—not epiphenomenal—to the accumulation of capital: capitalism in

fact relies upon the elaboration, reproduction, and exploitation of racial difference. As

Harsha Walia summarises, “[r]ace, class, gender, sexuality, and ability are not derivative

of capitalism and colonialism; oppression is foundational to the structuring of capitalism

and colonialism.”16 In reducing struggles around race (and gender) to questions of

recognition, critics of identity politics thus conceal what arguably is a much deeper

elision within the Marxist “politics of class”: namely, the white masculine identity

politics on which it de facto depends. In conceiving of the spread of working-class

consciousness as the basis for revolutionary struggle, Marxist orthodoxy actually frames

solidarity as a problem of identity—and, specifically, of masculine class identity.17 In

other words, it is only by separating race, sex, and gender domination from capitalist

domination that Marxism can privilege the (white male) proletariat as the (universal,

neutral, and general) revolutionary class of history. As Robinson explains, this means

that

“Marxism's internationalism was not global; its materialism was exposed as an insufficient explanator or cultural and social forces; and its economic determinism too often politically compromised freedom struggles beyond or outside of the metropole. For Black radicals, historically and immediately linked to social bases predominantly made of peasants and farmers in the West Indies, or sharecroppers and peons in North America, or forced laborers on colonial plantations in Africa, Marxism appeared distracted from the cruelest and most characteristic manifestations of the world economy. This exposed the inadequacies of Marxism as an apprehension of the world economy, but equally troubling was Marxism's neglect and miscomprehension of the nature and genesis of liberation struggles which already had occurred and surely had yet to appear among these people.”18

Chicago Press, 1996), 55.15 Quoted in Helen Davis, Understanding Stuart Hall (SAGE, 2004), 117.16 Harsha Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism (AK Press, 2014), 191.17 For a more detailed account of this argument, see Chris Chen, “The Limit Point of Capitalist

Equality,” Endnotes 3, accessed May 13, 2018, https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/3/en/chris-chen-the-limit-point-of-capitalist-equality.

18 Robinson, Black Marxism, xxx. For a contemporary formulation, see David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2014). Harvey suggests that race (as well as gender) is an external rather than constitutive part of the logic of capital. In contrast, scholars such as Lisa Lowe and David Roediger have argued that Marxism fails to account “for race in

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As Robinson makes clear, Marxism has ultimately been mistaken “for something it is

not: a total theory of liberation.”19

In the end, what critics of identity politics overlook is that the 1980s, and the rise

of a neoliberal consensus under Reagan and Thatcher, “was a defeat for the new social

movements, just as much as it was for organized labour.”20 Indeed, as Salar Mohandesi

explains “[w]hat began as a promise to push beyond some of socialism's limitations to

build a richer, more diverse and inclusive socialist politics”21 were soon appropriated

and watered down by political and economic elites, and subsequently used as a strategy

to neutralise radical movements. Forgotten in this process is that the original

formulation of identity politics emerged from an analysis of interlocking oppressions

under racial capitalism. In the next section I turn to the Black lesbian feminist

organisation the Combahee River Collective—who coined the term identity politics—to

demonstrate how a materialist reading of the global colour line unravels the

interconnected, global dimensions of freedom struggles. In contesting the idea that

labour and identity-based struggles are qualitatively different, this opens up space for a

different kind of revolutionary solidarity. As we shall see, it was precisely such a

solidarity that brought the Rainbow Coalition into being.

The Common Cause Is Freedom

The concept of identity politics was first introduced by the Combahee River

Collective in their now classic “A Black Feminist Statement” from 1978. Formed in

Boston in 1974 as a radical alternative to the National Black Feminist Organisation

(NBFO), the CRC operated on the premise that the inclusion of race into the feminist

the making of capitalism”, partly because it of its refusal to recognise that “capital has maximised its profits not through rendering labour abstract but precisely through the social production of difference marked by race, nation, geographical origins and gender.” Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Duke University Press, 1996), 28. See also David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (Verso, 1999) and David Roediger, Class, Race and Marxism (Verso Books, 2017).

19 Robin D. G. Kelley, “Introduction,” in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, by Cedric J. Robinson, 2000, 451.

20 Haider, Mistaken Identity, 99.21 Salar Mohandesi, “Identity Crisis,” Viewpoint Magazine, March 16, 2017,

https://www.viewpointmag.com/2017/03/16/identity-crisis/.As Asad Haider explains, “While the demands of these movements lived on, they grew increasingly detached from the grassroot mass mobilization that could advance the demands as a challenge to the whole system. Enormous progress was made at a cultural level, fundamentally changing our language. But the underlying material structures were spared.” Haider, Mistaken Identity, 99.

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movement was insufficient to account for the experience of Black women's oppression.

In contrast to the NBFO and the white feminist movement, founding members Barbara

Smith, Beverly Smith, and Demita Frazer openly described themselves as socialists

committed to struggling against capitalism. However, “although we are in essential

agreement with Marx’s theory as it applied to the very specific economic relationships

he analyzed, we know that this analysis must be extended further in order for us to

understand our specific economic situation as black women.”22 In particular, Marxist

theory was inadequate to explain “our specific economic situation as black women.”23

Anticipating Robinson's analysis of racial capitalism, the CRC instead sought to

formulate a socialist politics which recognised “the real class situation of persons who

are not merely raceless, sexless workers.”24 As the 1978 Statement made clear:

“The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.”25

Marxism had to be revised in order to account for the simultaneity of racism, class

exploitation, imperialist aggression, and gender subordination, because “the liberation

of all peoples” necessitates “the destruction of the political-economic systems of

capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy.”26 Identity politics, in this context,

referred not to recognition-seeking struggles or a project of cultural diversity—which is

how it is currently understood by critics such as Brown, Fraser, and Harvey. Instead, for

the women of the CRC identity politics named the particular politics that emerged from

placing their own experience—as Black lesbian women—at the centre of analysis. In

Barbara Smith's formulation,

“What we were saying is that we have a right as people who are not just female, who are not solely Black, who are not just lesbians, who are not

22 The Combahee River Collective. As Barbara Smith explains, “the reason Combahee's Black feminism is so powerful is because it's anticapitalist. One would expect Black feminism to be antiracist and opposed to sexism. Anticapitalism is what gives it the sharpness, the edge, the thoroughness, the revolutionary potential.” Quoted in Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (Haymarket Books, 2017).

23 The Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” 1977, https://americanstudies.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Keyword%20Coalition_Readings.pdf.

24 The Combahee River Collective.25 The Combahee River Collective.26 The Combahee River Collective.

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just working class, or workers—that we are people who embody all of these identities, and we have a right to build and define political theory and practice based upon that reality... That's what we meant by identity politics. We didn't mean that if you're not the same as us, you're nothing. We were not saying that we didn't care about anybody who wasn't exactly like us.”27

While contemporary critics often dismiss identity politics as divisive and

“balkanizing”—in short, as a Tower of Babel—for the members of Combahee it was

never exclusionary. Identity politics did not mean that only those who experience

oppression can work to overthrow it. The CRC rejected the idea that women should

separate from men (as advocated by lesbian separatists at the time) and instead

emphasised the importance of building coalitions to expand the fight for equality on

multiple fronts. As the Statement made clear: “We feel solidarity with progressive black

men and do not advocate the fractionalization that white women who are separatists

demand.’’28 Rather than a demand for separatism, the CRC thus envisioned identity

politics as a way of validating Black women's experience of oppression under racial

capitalism, while simultaneously opening up possibilities for connecting their struggle

—to the struggles of Black men in the United States, as well as to anti-colonial

movements and workers' struggles worldwide. As Keeyanga-Yamahtta Taylor explains,

for the Combahee solidarity thus “did not mean subsuming your struggles to help

someone else; it was intended to strengthen the political commitments from other

groups by getting them to recognize how the different struggles were related to each

other and connected under capitalism.”29 Far from a Tower of Babel, identity politics

was in fact the very foundation from which solidarity and coalitional politics could be

built.

27 As the 1978 statement read, “This focusing on our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else's oppression.” The Combahee River Collective.

28 The Combahee River Collective.29 Taylor, How We Get Free, 11. Founding member Demita Frazier elaborates on the importance of

coalitions to the work of the CRC: “I never believed that Combahee, or other Black feminist groups I have participated in, should focus only on issues of concern for us as Black women, or that, as lesbian/bisexual women, we should only focus on lesbian issues. It's really important to note that Combahee was instrumental in founding a local battered women's shelter. We worked in coalition with community activists, women and men, lesbians and straight folks. We were very active in the reproductive rights movement, even though, at the time, most of us were lesbians. We found ourselves involved in coalition with the labor movement because we believed in the importance of supporting other groups even if the individuals in that group weren't all feminist. We understood that coalition building was crucial to our own survival.” Quoted in Winifred Breines, The Trouble Between Us: An Uneasy History of White and Black Women in the Feminist Movement (Oxford University Press, 2007), 122.

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The women of the CRC are often credited with having laid the foundations for

what Kimberlé Crenshaw later would call intersectionality. While there are affinities

between these approaches, it is crucial to note that they also differ in important ways. In

mainstream discourse, intersectionality is today typically understood as an adding up of

independent oppressions; as accounting for race and class and gender. As Marsha Henry

explains, intersectionality is “a way of capturing multiple differences and their effects

on individuals.”30 Used to highlight the intersection of “multiple oppressions” as

experienced by individuals, the analysis of intersectionality has thus become

increasingly delinked from the systemic critique of capitalism. Where the vocabulary of

class figures, it is, as Delia Aguilar has argued, “merely designating income, occupation,

or lifestyle”, and ultimately “detached from mooring in the social relations of

production.”31 The concept of intersectionality has thus undergone a transformation:

from the CRC's explicitly materialist and systemic critique, in which race and gender

were understood as constitutive elements of the inner logic of capital, to the level of

discourse and identity—where it is vulnerable to precisely the critique put forward by

thinkers such as Brown, Fraser, and Harvey. The contemporary usage of

intersectionality thus stands in stark contrast to what the CRC originally had in mind:

“We are socialists,” they proclaimed, but “[w]e are not convinced... that a socialist

revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our

liberation.”32 Hence the original meaning of identity politics: namely, that race, gender,

and class oppression are different facets of the same system, not separate forms of

oppression that sometimes intersect. As Taylor explains, “the CRC statement identified

'class oppression' as central to the experience of Black women... in doing so they helped

to distinguish radical Black feminist politics from a developing middle-class orientation

in Black politics that was in the ascent in the 1970s.”33 While later (liberal) theorists of

intersectionality have followed the CRC in centre-staging the interlocking nature of

multiple forms of oppression, they have often been less interested in how and why these

systems of oppression historically came to be articulated together, as well as why they

continue to be reproduced together. In contrast, for the women of Combahee the

30 Marsha Henry, “Problematizing Military Masculinity, Intersectionality and Male Vulnerability in Feminist Critical Military Studies,” Critical Military Studies 3, no. 2 (May 4, 2017): 186, https://doi.org/10.1080/23337486.2017.1325140.

31 Delia D. Aguilar et al., “Tracing the Roots of Intersectionality,” MR Online (blog), April 12, 2012, https://mronline.org/2012/04/12/aguilar120412-html/.

32 The Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement.”33 Taylor, How We Get Free, 9.

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simultaneity of oppressions meant that socialism had to be much richer than previously

imagined: since capitalism operated through racial and gendered forms of oppression, a

socialism which did not centre-stage the struggle against both racism and sexism was

impoverished. Accordingly, to focus on Black women was not paramount to a rejection

of others who also endured economic inequality, as is sometimes suggested by

contemporary critics: rather it meant that the struggle for Black women's liberation, by

necessity, would destabilise inequality writ large and through that create new

possibilities for everyone.

In what ways does the Combahee's notion of identity politics help us rethink the

problem of solidarity? In highlighting how racial, sexual, and classed oppressions rely

on one another in complex ways, the CRC helpfully demonstrates why a focus on race

and gender need not detract attention from class: quite the opposite, a truly anti-

capitalist politics has to be anti-racist, anti-sexist, and internationalist. Such a

framework—which recognises the global, interconnected character of various freedom

struggles—offers a useful corrective to what has come to be known as the “Oppression

Olympics”, according to which marginalised groups compete against one another to

establish who is most oppressed.34 As Taylor rightly notes, such a perspective “miss how

we are connected through oppression—and how those connections should form the

basis of solidarity, not a celebration of our lives on the margins.”35 Indeed, a materialist

reading of the global colour line—grounded in a global political economic critique of

race and gender—points to the importance of addressing anti-Black racism, patriarchy,

settler colonialism, imperialism and other interlocking violences simultaneously. As

Paul Gilroy has argued, the value of such an approach is precisely that it renders “the

connection between history and concrete struggles, structure and process, intelligible

even in situations where collective actors define themselves and organize as 'races',

people, maroons, ghost-dancers or slaves rather than as a class.”36 This should not be

mistaken for a call to homogenise different forms of oppression; rather it highlights the

importance of examining how white supremacy, patriarchy, anti-immigrant xenophobia,

and settler colonialism interlock and mutually reinforce one another under racial

capitalism. The struggles against empire, white supremacy, settler colonialism, gender

subordination, and workers' exploitation are not the same—but they are interconnected.

34 The original formulation of Oppression Olympics can be found in Elizabeth Martínez, “Beyond Black/White: The Racisms of Our Time,” Social Justice 20, no. 1/2 (51–52) (1993): 22–34.

35 Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Haymarket Books, 2016), 187.

36 Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (Routledge, 2013), 24.

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It was precisely this insight that guided the Panthers and the Patriots when they

established the Rainbow Coalition. In a speech given at the Poor People's Convention in

1968, Peggy Terry of JOIN summarised the political commitment that had driven her

organisation to join the Coalition:

“Poor whites are here today... to make ourselves visible to a society whose continued existence depend on the denial of our existence. We are here today united with other races of poor people, Puerto Ricans, Mexican-Americans, Indians, and Black people in a common cause. That common cause is freedom!”37

Consequently, while the Rainbow Coalition today might “seem romantic at best,

propaganda at worst”, it was rooted in a sophisticated analysis of the racial logic of

capitalism. As Asad Haider has shown, the Black Panther Party recognised that “if you

talked about racism without talking about capitalism, you weren't talking about getting

power in the hands of the people. You were setting up a situation in which the white cop

would be replaced by a black cop”—and this, in the end, “was not liberation.”38 The

Rainbow Coalition thus emerged as a solution to the problem of how to challenge the

international, interlocking oppressions of race, class, empire, and gender. In the next

section I explore what this means for the theory and practice of internationalism.

Revolutionary Solidarity and the Politics of Internationalism

In chapter 1 I argued that cosmopolitan theories are rooted in particular

conceptions of solidarity: indeed, the problem for cosmopolitan thinkers is precisely one

of how to shift from solidarity among “friends” to solidarity with “strangers.” Solidarity

thus understood is a question of how to overcome difference. While different

cosmopolitans disagree on whether solidarity stems from a common human essence or

shared set of experiences, they typically conceive of solidarity as something that arises

(or that should arise) amongst people and groups that are alike. As Michael Principe

explains, most theorisations of solidarity implicitly agree that “one will be responsible

for those with which one has something in common.”39 In short, we stand in solidarity

37 Quoted in Richard Moser, “Radical White Workers During the Last Revolution,” Counterpunch, September 12, 2017, https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/09/12/radical-white-workers-during-the-last-revolution/.

38 Haider, Mistaken Identity, 18–19.39 Michael A. Principe, “Solidarity and Responsibility: Conceptual Connections,” Journal of Social

Philosophy 31, no. 2 (2000): 139–45, https://doi.org/10.1111/0047-2786.00035.

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with those that are “like us.”

In contrast to these perspectives, a materialist reading of the global colour line

opens up space for a different kind of solidarity: a revolutionary solidarity based on the

global, interconnected character of geographically dispersed freedom struggles, rather

than on abstract notions of what it means to be human. This is a solidarity which is

inherently internationalist in orientation: a solidarity which is made rather than found;

historically generated rather than ethically universal; and a doing rather than being.

Solidarity thus conceived offers a radical alternative to the (cosmopolitan) idea that

solidarity must be anchored in preexisting commonalities, and instead redefines it as a

relation forged in political struggle. Where cosmopolitan approaches often depict

solidarity as a one-way street whereby powerful and privileged actors extend solidarity

to those who suffer, this is a solidarity which is formed from the “ground” up and which

ultimately frames subalterns as agents rather than victims. Chandra Mohanty captures

the essence of what such a revolutionary solidarity might entail in her Feminism

Without Borders, where she argues for a coalitional politics grounded in “communities

of people who have chosen to work and fight together.”40 In contrast to cosmopolitan

approaches—which typically conceive of solidarity as something that arises from pre-

political, ontological, and ahistorical universalism—this is a solidarity which is “forged

on the basis of memories and counter narratives, not on an ahistorical universalism.”41

This is not a simplistic call for recognising common experiences of oppression and

marginalisation, but “an argument for recognizing (concrete, not abstract) 'common

interests' and the potential bases of cross-national solidarity—a common context of

struggle.”42 That is, in place of a solidarity that grows out of ethical universals and pre-

political identification, such a solidarity is politically and historically generated: a

coalitional politics “that has to be worked for, struggled toward—in history.”43 As

Sriram Ananth summarises, this means that “the realization of solidarity has to be

grounded in, emerge from, and evolve within real-life struggles. It must acknowledge

flesh-and-blood people who, despite all their differences, are finding common ground to

wage a liberatory struggle.”44

40 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders : Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham ; London: Duke University Press, 2003), 7.

41 Mohanty, 117. See also David Featherstone, Solidarity: Hidden Histories and Geographies of Internationalism (Zed Books Ltd., 2012).

42 Mohanty, 143.43 Mohanty, 116.44 Sriram Ananth, “Conceptualizing Solidarity and Realizing Struggle: Testing against the Palestinian

Call for the Boycott of Israel,” Interface: A Journal for and about Social Movements 6, no. 2 (2014):

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In recent years a number of scholars have sought to recover a variety of such

revolutionary or “subaltern solidarities”45, ranging from the Bandung spirit and

tricontinentalism, to the interactions between the Black radical imagination and the

Muslim Third World, to feminist Black internationalism, and the “deep relations”

between African and Maori anti-colonial struggles.46 Capturing the political and

historical character of these solidarities, Vijay Prashad notes how, in the era of anti-

colonial and Third World national liberation struggles,

“[u]nity of the people of the Third World came from a political position against colonialism and imperialism, not from any intrinsic cultural or racial commonalities. If you thought against colonialism and stood against imperialism, then you were part of the Third World.”47

Solidarity, in these contexts, was organised around the idea of a shared global struggle,

and entailed a weaving together of revolutionary world-views and radical traditions. In

the words of Linda Tabar, “'international' was not a pre-determined group” but

“something that you became, in the praxis of struggle for a different world and an

alternative global order.”48

Crucially, the concept of revolutionary solidarity opens up space for a different

kind of cosmopolitan theory and practice: namely, for an oppositional or insurgent

158.45 Mustapha Kamal Pasha, “The ‘Bandung Impulse’ and International Relations,” in Postcolonial Theory

and International Relations: A Critical Introduction, ed. Sanjay Seth (Routledge, 2013), 154. See also Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (University of Pittsburgh Pre, 2009), 133 for a formulation of “subterranean solidarity.”

46 Indicatively, see Sohail Daulatzai, Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom Beyond America (U of Minnesota Press, 2012); Cheryl Higashida, Black Internationalist Feminism: Women Writers of the Black Left, 1945-1995 (University of Illinois Press, 2011); Alex Lubin, Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab Political Imaginary (UNC Press Books, 2014); Vijay Prashad, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (Verso Books, 2013); Vijay Prashad, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (Beacon Press, 2002); Robbie Shilliam, The Black Pacific: Anti-Colonial Struggles and Oceanic Connections (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015); Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Harvard University Press, 2012); Darryl C. Thomas, The Theory and Practice of Third World Solidarity (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2001).

47 Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (ReadHowYouWant.com, 2010), 34.As Arif Dirlik explains, “the idea of the Third World pointed to the necessity of a common politics that derived from a common positioning in the system (rather than some homogeneous essentialized common quality, as is erroneously assumed these days in much postcolonial criticism).” Arif Dirlik, “Rethinking Colonialism: Globalization, Postcolonialism, And The Nation,” Interventions 4, no. 3 (January 1, 2002): 433, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801022000013833.

48 Linda Tabar, “From Third World Internationalism to ‘the Internationals’: The Transformation of Solidarity with Palestine,” Third World Quarterly 38, no. 2 (February 1, 2017): 418, https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2016.1142369.

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internationalism. If different forms of oppression interlock under racial capitalism, then

a revolutionary solidarity must necessarily be internationalist in its orientation. Steven

Salaita gestures towards precisely such an internationalism in his comparative work on

the national liberation movements of Palestinians and Indigenous peoples in North

America. He posits “inter/nationalism” as a certain kind of decolonial thought and

practice which “at its most basic... demands commitment to mutual liberation based on

the proposition that colonial power must be rendered diffuse across multiple

hemispheres through reciprocal struggle.”49 This is an internationalist theory and

practice which aspires to connect—rather than unify—different projects and trajectories

in a global process of decolonisation. Boaventura de Sosa Santos work on the anti-

globalisation movement and the World Social Forum develops a similar conception.

Calling for “a new kind of situated, insurgent, decolonial, intercultural, bottom-up,

cosmopolitan culture and politics”50, Santos argues that there is an ongoing counter-

hegemonic globalisation from below that links together “social groups, networks,

initiatives, organisations and movements” struggling against neoliberal globalisation.51

This, he maintains, represents an internationalism from the South, where the South

expresses “not a geographical location but all forms of subordination (economic

exploitation; gender, racial and ethic oppression and so on) associated with neoliberal

globalization.”52 Such an insurgent or oppositional internationalism must ultimately be

understood as an emancipatory project in which oppressed groups “organize their

resistance and consolidate political coalitions on the same scale as the one used by the

oppressors to victimize them, that is, the global scale.”53 The overall goal here is not the

creation of some form of a universal community based on law, rights, and citizenship, as

it is for the cosmopolitan thinkers discussed in chapter 1. Instead, and as Bradley

49 Steven Salaita, Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine, 1 edition (Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2016), ix.

50 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide (Routledge, 2015), 68.

51 Santos insurgent cosmopolitanism seeks to address the needs of those “groups whose aspirations are denied or made invisible by the hegemonic use of the concept but who may be sereved by an alternative use of it”. “Who needs cosmopolitanism?” he asks. “The answer is simple: whoever is a victim of intolernace and discrimination needs tolernace; whoever is denied basic human dignity needs a community of human beings; whoever is a noncitizen needs world citizenship in any given community or nation. In sum, those socially excluded victims of the hegemonic conceptions of cosmopolitanism need a different type of cosmopolitanism. Subaltern cosmopolitanism is therefore an oppositional variety.” Santos, 135.

52 Boaventura de Sousa Santos and César A. Rodríguez-Garavito, “Law, Politics, and the Subaltern in Counter-Hegemonic Globalization,” in Law and Globalization from Below: Towards a Cosmopolitan Legality, ed. Boaventura de Sousa Santos and César A. Rodríguez-Garavito (Cambridge University Press, 2005), 14.

53 Santos, Epistemologies of the South, 135.

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Macdonald has argued, it seeks “to articulate localized issues and struggles into an

overall internationalism... It sees the necessity of understanding each particular struggle

in the world as part of larger drama.”54 This does not deny the uniqueness and

specificity of local struggles; instead it emphasises their international character and thus

points to the importance of connecting—but not unifying—different struggles, projects,

and trajectories under racial capitalism.

David Theo Goldberg's concept of relational racisms helpfully demonstrates the

methodological and political stakes of such an analysis. As Goldberg makes clear, the

prevailing paradigm for studying race and racism has historically been comparative.

Whether focused on Britain, the US, Canada, Australia, or South Africa, such analyses

have typically been framed by methodological nationalism, seeking to reveal similarities

and differences between different national expressions of racism. While comparative

approaches are not without merit, as Goldberg makes clear, they “actually seem to miss

a crucial dimension for comprehending racial significance and racist conditioning in all

their complexity”:55 namely, the global colour line. Taking Gaza and the Warsaw ghetto

as an example, he argues that local racisms “are almost always tied to extra- and trans-

territorial conceptions and expressions, those that revolve in the wider circles of

meaning and practice.”56 From a relational perspective, the point is not just that Gaza is

like (or as some would argue, unlike) the Warsaw ghetto but also, and more

fundamentally, “that Israeli military officers are on record for explicitly invoking the

Warsaw ghetto as a model for thinking about how to regulate the Palestinian refugee

camps.”57 That is, just as the early 20th century British and German concentration camps

in Africa served as models for the Nazi Holocaust, so the Warsaw ghetto provides a

model for the occupation of Gaza. Recognising these linkages and interconnected

histories and logics, Goldberg argues, can help us understand that “racist arrangements

anywhere—in any place—depend, to a smaller or larger degree, on racist practice

almost everywhere else.”58 The internationalism that grows out of this recognition is

thus anchored in an analysis of relational logics—not comparative similarities.

54 Bradley J. Macdonald, Performing Marx: Contemporary Negotiations of a Living Tradition (SUNY Press, 2012), 147.

55 David Theo Goldberg, “Racial Comparisons, Relational Racisms: Some Thoughts on Method,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 32, no. 7 (September 1, 2009): 253, https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870902999233.

56 Goldberg, “Racial Comparisons, Relational Racisms.” As Goldberg explains, “local practices that appear homegrown more often than not have a genealogy at least in part not simply limited to the local.”

57 Goldberg, 258.58 Goldberg, 255.

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To conceive of internationalism in this way—as a shared struggle against

interlocking oppressions under racial capitalism—is ultimately to enact a shift in focus,

from the spectacle of the dying bodies of subaltern others to the structural violence that

produces subalternity. As Lawrence Blum reminds us, “there is a difference between

solidarity with people suffering from oppression, and solidarity with those actively

resisting it.”59 From a radical internationalist perspective, the overall goal is not empathy

and affective identification with suffering (as it is for many cosmopolitan thinkers) but,

rather, collective struggles against systems of oppression. Nikita Dhawan describes this

as “a move away from a politics of help that reinforces asymmetrical relations between

givers and receivers of solidarity to a subversive listening, wherein global agents are

hospitable to the idea of learning from those whose epistemic agency has been

historically disregarded.”60 In contrast to cosmopolitan approaches that typically

foreground the spectacle of the suffering, the poor, and the oppressed, radical

internationalism thus shifts the focus to the global material structures that produce “slow

death”61 and suffering. This is not a practice based on “saving” suffering others “out

there”, but a relation that grows out of concrete struggles for liberation.

Ken Gonzales-Day's “Erased Lynching” series from 2006 powerfully illustrates

what such a shift in focus might look like and mean.62 A collection of old postcards and

photographs, Gonzales-Day's series explores the history of lynchings in the United

States. The pictures depict scenes of mob violence, but without the brutalised bodies in

the original images, which have been digitally removed. Left are the crowds of

onlookers, laughing and jeering. As Gonzales-Day explains, the purpose of the pictures

is to “direct the viewers attention, not upon the lifeless body of lynch victim, but upon

the mechanisms of lynching themselves: the crowd, the spectacle, the photographer.”63

By removing the lynched bodies, the pictures refuse to allow violence to define the

Black body. Focusing on the perpetrators, they instead raise questions about “the

conditions that made these events possible in the first place.”64

59 Quoted in Gideon Calder, Magali Bessone, and Federico Zuolo, How Groups Matter: Challenges of Toleration in Pluralistic Societies (Routledge, 2014), 176.

60 Dhawan Nikita, “Can Non‐Europeans Philosophize? Transnational Literacy and Planetary Ethics in a Global Age,” Hypatia 32, no. 3 (May 24, 2017): 502, https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12333.

61 Lauren Berlant, “Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency),” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 4 (2007): 754, https://doi.org/10.1086/521568.

62 The erased lynching series can be viewed on https://kengonzalesday.com/projects/erased-lynchings/ 63 Quoted in Django Paris, Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry With Youth and

Communities (SAGE, 2013), 241.64 Marianne Combs, “Artist Finds New Meaning in Images of Lynchings,” accessed September 5, 2017,

https://www.mprnews.org/story/2017/01/23/artist-finds-new-meaning-in-images-of-lynchings.

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Conclusion

In this chapter I have argued that a materialist analysis of the global colour line

opens up new possibilities for solidarity and emancipatory politics. Groups like the

CRC, the Black Panthers, and the Patriots defy any easy distinction between identity

politics and class struggle. In linking up the struggles against racism, capitalism,

patriarchy, and imperialism, the CRC and the Rainbow Coalition enacted a different

kind of solidarity—a “many-headed hydra”—which was based, not on sameness or

shared experiences, but on an analysis of interlocking oppressions under racial

capitalism. In the same way that Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism insisted on reading

the plantations of Mississippi and the factories of Manchester not as separate systems

but as differentiated and complementary parts of the same global economy, these groups

understood their struggles as mutually constitutive and dialectically entwined.65 By

reconnecting and aligning different struggles—struggles which might seem distinct and

unrelated but which, when viewed through the lens of racial capitalism, turn out to be

closely related—they help us re-imagine solidarity and internationalism beyond the

“master's tools.”

What, then, does this “many-headed hydra” look like today? In the next three

chapters I turn to the violent surplussing and policing of racialized life in a range of

contexts—including the migrant crisis in Europe, the movement for Black lives in the

United States, the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and the struggle

for decolonisation in South Africa—to explore how today's motley crew of “planetary

wanderers” are enacting a hydra-like internationalism from below. My analysis

specifically highlights four themes: first, the violent surplussing of racialized

populations under racial capitalism; second, the growth of the penal and nationals

security state, and how it is designed to police and pacify those rendered surplus by

racial capitalism; third, the inherently global dimensions of these violent dynamics; and

fourth, how they are being resisted and challenged. As we shall see, in the process of

linking together seemingly disparate spaces and histories of revolutionary struggles, the

planetary wanderers of today are building a counter-archive of internationalist theory

65 In the words of Huey Newton, “The Black Panther Party is a revolutionary nationalist group and we see a major contradiction between capitalism in this country and out interests. We realize that this country became very rich upon slavery and that slavery is capitalism in the extreme. We have to evils to fight, capitalism and racism. We must destroy both racism and capitalism.” Quoted in Ahmed Shawki, Black Liberation and Socialism (Haymarket Books, 2005), 211.

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and practice. It is to this archive that we now turn.

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C H A P T E R 5

The Drowned and the Saved: Circuits of Resistance in the Black Mediterranean

“Political struggles are not fought on the surface of geography but through its very fabrication.”

—Steve Pile1

“We didn't cross the border, the border crossed us.”—Popular activist chant

Introduction

On the evening of the 3rd of October 2013, an overcrowded fishing boat carrying

more than 500 migrants sank off the coast of the Italian island Lampedusa.2 Amongst

the 368 found dead was an Eritrean woman who had given birth as she drowned. The

divers found her a hundred and fifty feet down in the ocean together with her newborn

baby, still attached by the umbilical cord. Her name was Yohanna, the Eritrean word for

“congratulations.”3

Over the last 25 years, the turquoise-blue waters of the Mediterranean have been

turned into a space of death and suffering, what some describe as “a nautical

graveyard”4 and a new “frontier of poverty.”5 What is typically referred to as the

European migrant or refugee “crisis” has provoked numerous responses and activism;

1 Steve Pile, “The Troubled Spaces of Frantz Fanon,” in Thinking Space, ed. Mike Crang and N. J. Thrift (Psychology Press, 2000), 273.

2 Sections of this chapter have been published as part of Ida Danewid, “White Innocence in the Black Mediterranean: Hospitality and the Erasure of History,” Third World Quarterly 38, no. 7 (July 3, 2017): 1674–89, https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2017.1331123.

3 Yohanna's story is recounted in Frances Stonor Saunders, “Where on Earth Are You?,” London Review of Books, March 3, 2016 and Mattathias Schwartz, “Letter from Lampedusa: The Anchor,” The New Yorker, April 21, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/04/21/the-anchor.

4 Liz Fekete, “Death at the Border – Who Is to Blame? | Institute of Race Relations,” accessed August 31, 2016, http://www.irr.org.uk/news/death-at-the-border-who-is-to-blame/.

5 Anna Triandafyllidou and Ruby Gropas, What Is Europe? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 170. The International Organization of Migration (IOM) estimates that between 2000 and 2014, 22,400 migrants died while trying to cross the Mediterranean; in 2015 and the first half of 2015, another 6,600 migrant deaths have so far been reported. See Tara Brian and Frank Laczko, “Fatal Journeys: Tracking Lives Lost during Migration” (International Organization for Migration (IOM), 2014) and “Missing Migrants and Managing Dead Bodies in the Mediterranean: A Briefing Note” (International Organization for Migration (IOM), 2016), http://iomgmdac.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Mediterranean-Missing-Briefing-Note-June2016.pdf. IOM's latest figures are available at http://missingmigrants.iom.int/

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ranging from Ai Wei Wei's life vest installation6 to Pope Francis's “day of tears”,7 from

Angela Merkel's “open door” refugee policy8 to radical activist campaigns such as “The

Dead Are Coming”,9 from the silent minute in the European parliament10 to

#AlanKurdi.11 Responding to an era shaped by the global war on terror and securitizing

discourses that figure the nation-state as a body under threat, a variety of scholars,

activists, artists, and politicians have called for empathy and solidarity with the fate of

shipwrecked migrants. By recognising and publicly mourning the lives that have been

lost, many have sought to “humanise” those who, like Yohanna and her baby, are

swallowed by the turquoise-blue waters of “Our Sea.”

These expressions of solidarity stand in sharp contrast to populist, far right, anti-

immigrant, and xenophobic discourses that portray migrants as a form of danger—to

Europe's security, welfare state, women, and so on. And yet, and as I argue in this

chapter, these discourses actually share an underlying assumption of migrants as

“strangers,” “uninvited guests”, and “charitable subjects: that is, as people fleeing

conditions and conflicts that supposedly originate “elsewhere”, outside of Europe. As

Ethemcan Turhan and Marco Armiero explain, this framing of Europe as an innocent

bystander overlooks that

“migration is often an externality of military interventions, proxy wars, imposition of structural economic reforms, multi-causal destruction of livelihoods both by rapid and slow violence through environmental change, establishment of enclosures, and corporate imperialism that have dispossessed and continues to dispossess people in different corners of the world.”12

By evading Europe's long, constitutive history of empire, colonial conquest, and racial

capitalism, as well as the ways in which (neoliberal) capital continues to depend on the

6 Lauren Said-Moorhouse CNN, “Ai Weiwei Covers Berlin Venue with Refugee Life Vests,” CNN, accessed May 3, 2017, http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/14/arts/ai-weiwei-berlin-life-jackets/index.html.

7 “Pope Francis: Migrants’ Deaths Are Shameful,” accessed May 3, 2017, http://www.news.va/en/news/pope-francis-migrants-deaths-are-shameful.

8 “Angela Merkel Defends Germany’s Open-Door Refugee Policy,” Financial Times, accessed May 3, 2017, https://www.ft.com/content/a60f289a-9362-11e5-bd82-c1fb87bef7af.

9 raisa2, “‘The dead are coming’: Germans dig mock graves for migrants who died at sea,” Text, The Stream - Al Jazeera English, June 22, 2015, http://ajmn.tv/7sn5.

10 “Opening: Minute’s Silence for Migrants Drowned off Lampedusa,” European Parliament News, October 7, 2013, http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/news-room/20131004IPR21512/opening-minute’s-silence-for-migrants-drowned-off-lampedusa.

11 The twitter feed can be found at: https://twitter.com/hashtag/Alankurdi12 See Ethemcan Turhan and Marco Armiero, “Cutting the Fence, Sabotaging the Border: Migration as a

Revolutionary Practice,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 28, no. 2 (April 3, 2017): 2, https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2017.1315245.

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production of vulnerable, deportable, and therefore super-exploitable (non-white)

workers, these discourses ultimately contribute to an ideological discourse that turns

questions of responsibility, guilt, restitution, repentance, and structural reform into

matters of empathy, generosity, and hospitality. The result is a form of “white

innocence”13 through which the white subject re-constitutes itself as “ethical” and

“good”, innocent of its imperialist histories and present complicities. This not only

reproduces colonial and patronising fantasies of the white man's burden, but also helps

legitimise hegemonic narratives that see Europe as the bastion of democracy, liberty,

and universal rights.

What might a different form of solidarity look like—a solidarity that takes

seriously the materiality of the global colour line and that challenges, rather than

confirms, the idea that Europe constitutes the pinnacle of freedom, democracy, and

humanism? To answer this question, in this chapter I examine the political economy of

migration, focusing in particular on the links between racial capitalism, imperialism,

(neo)colonial dispossession, and global migration. Building on political economic

critique of race and racism put forward in the last two chapters, I argue that migration

constitutes one of the main contemporary routes through which populations racialized as

non-white are rendered surplus under racial capitalism. The creation of a highly

expendable, super-exploitable, and moveable workforce—be it slaves, sharecroppers, or

coolies—has historically been central to the world capitalist system. Today, under

neoliberalism and corporate globalisation,

“a new global immigrant labor supply system has come to replace earlier direct colonial and racial caste controls over labor worldwide. There is a new global working class that labors in the factories, farms, commercial establishments and offices of the global economy—a working class that faces conditions of precariousness, is heavily female, and increasingly [is] based on immigrant labor.”14

To recognise these historical and contemporary links between race, capital, and

migration is not only to challenge hegemonic discourses that present Europe as the

bastion of democracy, liberty, and universal rights. As activist groups such as Black

Lives Matter UK and Parti des Indigènes de la République have shown, it is also to open

up space for a different kind of internationalism and politics of solidarity—a solidarity

13 Gloria Wekker, White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race (Duke University Press, 2016).14 William I. Robinson, “Global Capitalism, Immigrant Labor, and the Struggle for Justice,” Class, Race

and Corporate Power 2, no. 3 (2014): 3.

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beyond the “master's tools” and which places the ongoing migrant crisis within a

broader historical context of anti-racist and antic-capitalist struggles both within and

outside of Europe.

I develop this argument in four parts. In the first section I demonstrate how

recent forms of (liberal) pro-refugee activism in Europe have challenged xenophobic

discourses that cast migrants as ethically non-recognised subjects—what Judith Butler

describes as “ungrievable life.” The second section begins to build a critique of these

discourses through a focus on political economy and the historical connections between

Europe and the migrants washed up on its shores. Drawing on the concept of the Black

Mediterranean, I argue that the contemporary migrant crisis must be understood in the

context of Europe's constitutive history of empire, racial capitalism, and colonial

conquest. In the third section I argue that the erasure of these connections has enabled

recent forms of pro-refugee activism to turn dead migrants into the conduit through

which the European Left redeems its own humanity and ethical salvation—something

that ultimately raises questions around whose humanity is at stake, and for what

purposes. In the final section I focus on the creation of alternative forms of solidarity

emerging from an analysis of the materiality of the global colour line. Focusing on

Black Lives Matter UK and Parti des Indigènes de la République, I show how some

activist groups connect the mass deaths of migrants during crossings of the

Mediterranean to anti-racist and anti-capitalist struggles within Europe. By placing the

ongoing migrant crisis within a broader analysis of empire, racial capitalism, labour

exploitation, and (neo)colonialism, these groups open up space for new forms of

solidarity: for an internationalism and “many-headed hydra” that subverts the national

“we” and that brings together migrants, refugees, workers, and European minorities

(Blacks, Muslims, women, Roma, Sami, and so on) in a shared struggle against the

violent surplussing of life under racial capitalism.

Borders and the Politics of Solidarity

In June 2015, the German activist collective the Center for Political Beauty,

CPB, staged a mass funeral in Berlin to honour the thousand of migrants that have died

trying to cross the Mediterranean. With the permission of relatives, bodies of migrants

buried at the periphery of Europe were exhumed and transported to Berlin, where they

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were to be given a “dignified burial” before the eyes of their “bureaucratic murderers.”15

“The German government’s worst nightmare is coming true”, explained the group:

“Over the next few days, refugees who drowned or starved to death at Europe’s external

borders on their way to a new life, will be brought to Berlin. The aim is to tear down the

walls surrounding Europe’s sense of compassion.”16 Inviting the residents of Berlin to

join them in commemorating the victims of “Europe’s aggressively sealed-off

borders”,17 the group drew together thousands of protestors who together marched

towards the vast grass lawn between the Chancellery and the German Parliament, where

they dug holes and left behind “a mass graveyard at the heart of a leading bourgeois

democracy.”18

Like many other activist groups, the CPB contests the hegemonic framing of the

migrant crisis as a distinctively humanitarian emergency. The European border regime,

they argue, has converted the Mediterranean into a mass graveyard. As William Walters

explains, the increased securitization and militarization of the borders of the global

North has been negotiated with the emergence of humanitarian aid and services located

in border regions; “[i]f certain border zones are becoming spaces of humanitarian

engagement, this is only because border crossing has been made, for certain segments of

the world’s migratory population, into a matter of life and death.”19 Consequently, while

migrants are typically referred to as “fatalities”20—as victims of bad weather conditions,

substandard vessels, and inadequate food and water supplies—this obfuscates that the

Mediterranean need not be the main route of travel for migrants. Rather, and as Polly

Pallister-Wilkins points out, it becomes the only viable means of transportation through

a combination of EU border policies that deny people the possibility to fly and that

closes off land borders, such as restrictive visa policies, advanced surveillance

technology, naval patrols, armed guards and guard dogs, and “the time honoured

tradition of fencing.”21 Before the European Union was formed and Schengen visas

15 “Art Collective Buries Migrants in Berlin,” artnet News, June 18, 2015, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/art-collective-bury-dead-migrants-berlin-308975.

16 The statement is available at http://politicalbeauty.com/dead.html 17 Ibid.18 Alice von Bieberstein and Erdem Evren, “From Aggressive Humanism to Improper Mourning:

Burying the Victims of Europe’s Border Regime in Berlin,” Social Research: An International Quarterly 83, no. 2 (October 4, 2016): 454.

19 Walters, “‘Foucault and Frontiers: Notes on the Birth of the Humanitarian Border,” 147.20 Brian and Laczko, “Fatal Journeys: Tracking Lives Lost during Migration,” 11.21 Polly Pallister-Wilkins, “There’s A Focus On The Boats Because The Sea Is Sexier Than The Land: A

Reflection on the Centrality of the Boats in the Recent ‘Migration Crisis,’” The Disorder of Things (blog), December 9, 2015, https://thedisorderofthings.com/2015/12/09/theres-a-focus-on-the-boats-because-the-sea-is-sexier-than-the-land-a-reflection-on-the-centrality-of-the-boats-in-the-recent-migration-crisis/.

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introduced, North Africans could travel freely back and forth to work in Europe or go on

holiday. The signing of the Schengen accords in 1991 rendered these crossings illegal

and also more dangerous, leading to the first of many recorded deaths along the Strait of

Gibraltar.22 When Spain began installing sophisticated border control systems, migrants

were forced to resort to smuggling and more dangerous sea routes to reach Europe.

While the CPB's burial of deceased migrants has received mixed responses—

some have called it an act of “political pornography”,23 others have hailed it as an

attempt to “transform refugees into people”24—a variety of actors have followed the

group in framing their calls for empathy, hospitality, and the right to asylum through the

rhetoric and iconography of loss and mourning. In 2008 Mimmo Paladino's memorial

sculpture Porta d'Europa/Gateway to Europe was built on Lampedusa to commemorate

the migrants who have drowned while trying to reach Europe.25 Shaped as an open door

facing the sea, the sculpture seeks to bring to memory those who, in Butler's

terminology, are ungrievable; those who, “not conceivable as lives within certain

epistemological frames [...] are never lived nor lost in the full sense.”26 In 2013, after a a

shipwreck off Lampedusa caused the death of 368 migrants, the European parliament

observed a minute of silence, President Martin Schultz later explaining that he had spent

the minute imagining “the screams of children seeing their parents drown, of parents

unable to save their children.”27 Pope Francis condemned the “globalization of

indifference” and declared “a day of tears”, while the Italian Prime Minister Enrico

Letta promised posthumous citizenship and a state funeral for the victims.28 More

recently, activist organisations such as Boats4People, TracesBack, and the Italian

feminist collective 2511 have held public commemorations for Europe's migrant dead,

demanding the right to have the dead identified and properly buried, and for relatives to

22 Miriam Ticktin, “The Problem with Humanitarian Borders,” Public Seminar (blog), accessed September 2, 2016, http://www.publicseminar.org/2015/09/the-problem-with-humanitarian-borders/.

23 “Creative Activism in Berlin on the Refugee Crisis: ‘The Dead Are Coming’ - Qantara.de,” Qantara.de - Dialogue with the Islamic World, accessed March 22, 2017, https://en.qantara.de/content/creative-activism-in-berlin-on-the-refugee-crisis-the-dead-are-coming.

24 Berliner Zeitung, quoted on http://politicalbeauty.com/dead.html 25 SPIEGEL ONLINE, Hamburg Germany, “Africans Remembered: A Memorial for Europe’s Lost

Migrants - SPIEGEL ONLINE - International,” SPIEGEL ONLINE, accessed January 9, 2017, http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/africans-remembered-a-memorial-for-europe-s-lost-migrants-a-560218.html.

26 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2010), 1.27 “Opening: Minute’s Silence for Migrants Drowned off Lampedusa.”28 Tom Kington, “Lampedusa Shipwreck: Italy to Hold State Funeral for Drowned Migrants,” The

Guardian, October 9, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/09/lampedusa-shipwreck-italy-state-funeral-migrants.

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reclaim the bodies and personal belongings of the dead.29

A recent special issue on “Borders and the Politics of Mourning” links these

interventions to Judith Butler's ethics of grieving ungrievable life—which we

encountered in chapter 1—and explores the political force of public grief for strangers

(in this case, migrants).30 Mourning, the contributors argue, enables “new affective and

political grammars in response to suffering, injustice and death.”31 Pro-refugee groups

such as the CPB are praised for asserting “a politics of mourning that disrupts the script

of nationalist kinship”,32 and for scandalizing what makes migrant deaths possible in the

first place. Grief for unknown others—for strangers—is here understood as offering a

radical challenge to the xenophobia and white nationalism that underwrite the

necropolitical logic of the European border regime. Nonetheless, when viewed closely

these calls for rescue, welcome, and hospitality turn out to confirm rather than disturb

colonial-capitalist relations of power. In the next section I show how a materialist

reading of the global colour line disrupts these hegemonic narratives. As we shall see, in

seeking to extend “grief and care to the dead stranger”33 these left-liberal interventions

contribute to an ideological formation that disconnects connected histories and divorces

the contemporary migrant crisis from Europe's long and ongoing history of empire,

racial capitalism, and colonial conquest.

The Black Mediterranean: Racial Capitalism and the Political Economy of Migration

The term the “Black Mediterranean” has recently started to surface amongst

academics, artists, and activists to describe the history of racial subordination in the

Mediterranean region.34 Inspired by Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic, the Black

29 Kim Rygiel, “In Life Through Death: Transgressive Citizenship at the Border,” in Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies, ed. Engin Isin and Peter Nyers (Routledge, 2014).

30 See in particular Alexandra Délano Alonso and Benjamin Nienass, “Introduction: Borders and the Politics of Mourning,” Social Research: An International Quarterly 83, no. 2 (October 4, 2016): xix – xxxi and Bieberstein and Evren, “From Aggressive Humanism to Improper Mourning.” See also Maurice Stierl, “Contestations in Death – the Role of Grief in Migration Struggles,” Citizenship Studies 20, no. 2 (February 17, 2016): 173–91, doi:10.1080/13621025.2015.1132571 and Aleksandra Lewicki, “‘The Dead Are Coming’: Acts of Citizenship at Europe’s Borders,” Citizenship Studies 0, no. 0 (November 3, 2016): 1–16, https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2016.1252717.

31 Miriam Ticktin, “Thinking Beyond Humanitarian Borders,” Social Research: An International Quarterly 83, no. 2 (October 4, 2016): 256.

32 Bieberstein and Evren, “From Aggressive Humanism to Improper Mourning,” 461.33 Bieberstein and Evren, 461.34 The term “Black Mediterranean” was first coined by Alessandra di Maio, see Alessandra di Maio,

“The Mediterranean, or Where Africa Does (Not) Meet Italy: Andrea Segre’s A Sud Di Lampedusa,” in The Cinemas of Italian Migration: European and Transatlantic Narratives, ed. Sabine Schrader and Daniel Winkler (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014).

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Mediterranean invites us to place the contemporary migrant crisis in the context of

Europe's constitutive history of empire, racial capitalism, and colonial conquest. As

Khalil Saucier and Tryon P. Woods explain, the Mediterranean “has been an ongoing

crisis for black people for the better part of the past and present millenniums.”35 As we

saw in chapter 3, there was never such a thing as European modernity without slavery,

and “the history of Manchester never happened without the history of Mississippi.”36

While modernity typically is understood as an exclusively European phenomenon—as a

product of the European Renaissance and Enlightenment—in reality “modernity appears

when Europe affirms itself as the 'center' of a World History that it inaugurates.”37

Colonial conquest and transatlantic slavery not only contributed to the growth of

industrial capitalism in Western Europe38 but also, and importantly, provided the

condition of possibility for the formation of Enlightenment thought. The very idea of

Europe emerged through a process of differentiation from the “periphery” that

surrounds it; hence, and as Édouard Glissant has argued, Europe is not a place but a

project.39

Viewed through the lens of the Black Mediterranean, the contemporary migrant

crisis is not a moment of exception or discrete event in time, but a late consequence of

Europe's ongoing encounter with the world that it created through more than five

hundred years of empire, colonial conquest, and racial capitalism.40 As Saucier makes

clear, what we are witnessing today is “a new declination of an older repressed issue”

that “has its roots in Mediterranean racial slavery, Enlightenment thought (i.e.

humanism that has relied on the provision of a dehumanized other), the colonial North-

South relationship, its colonial legacy, as well as in its fascist and imperial worldview.” 41

35 “Slavery’s Afterlife in the Euro-Mediterranean Basin,” openDemocracy, June 18, 2015, https://www.opendemocracy.net/beyondslavery/tryon-p-woods-p-khalil-saucier/slavery%E2%80%99s-afterlife-in-euromediterranean-basin.

36 Walter Johnson, “To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Justice,” Text, Boston Review, October 19, 2016, https://bostonreview.net/race/walter-johnson-slavery-human-rights-racial-capitalism.

37 Enrique Dussel, “Eurocentrism and Modernity (Introduction to the Frankfurt Lectures),” Boundary 2 20, no. 3 (1993): 65, https://doi.org/10.2307/303341.

38 See Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Fahamu/Pambazuka, 2012).39 Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays (University Press of Virginia, 1989).40 P. Khalil Saucier and Tryon P. Woods, “Ex Aqua: The Mediterranean Basin, Africans on the Move,

and the Politics of Policing,” Theoria 61, no. 141 (December 1, 2014): 55–75, https://doi.org/10.3167/th.2014.6114104; Broeck, “Commentary (In Response to Michel Feith).” See also Reece Jones, Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move (Verso, 2016); Lucy Mayblin, Asylum After Empire: Colonial Legacies in the Politics of Asylum Seeking (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017).

41 Broeck, “Commentary (In Response to Michel Feith),” 33. See also Nicholas De Genova, “The ‘migrant Crisis’ as Racial Crisis: Do Black Lives Matter in Europe?,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 0, no. 0 (August 21, 2017): 1–18, https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2017.1361543.

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The philosophical disappearance of this history has served as a bedrock for

contemporary discourses of migration, solidifying the belief that the ongoing crisis

originates “elsewhere”, outside of Europe—and that Europe, as a result, is an innocent

bystander.42 Indeed, in Western media and wider political discourse, the migrant crisis is

often discussed as the byproduct of the war in Syria and conflicts across North Africa.

The International Commission for Missing Persons, for example, maintains that “There

is no mystery as to why more and more people are following what is now the world’s

most dangerous migration route—and why so many are dying in the attempt. Fighting in

Syria, Iraq, Libya and parts of sub-Saharan Africa, including Congo and Chad, has

caused millions to seek asylum, first in neighbouring countries and then in Europe.”43

The New York Times similarly notes that “The roots of this catastrophe lie in crises the

European Union cannot solve alone: war in Syria and Iraq, chaos in Libya, destitution

and brutal regimes in Africa.”44 While it is true that the immediate cause of European

migration is the breakdown of authority and ongoing conflicts in the Middle East and

North Africa, this framing overlooks how Europe has been implicated—economically,

militarily, and politically—in creating these violent conditions. A recent work by David

Miller is notable in this regard, starting, as it does, from the premise that migrants are

“Strangers in Our Midst”45, as indicated by its title. In his latest book, Zygmunt Bauman

similarly assumes that migrants are “Strangers at Our Door.” Like Miller, he takes it as a

given that Europe is external to the origins of the “crisis”; “one cannot help”, he writes,

“but notice that the massive and sudden appearance of strangers on our streets neither

has been caused by us nor is under our control. No one consulted us; no one asked our

agreement.”46 With such a framing, Miller and Bauman both occlude the broader

question of Europe's responsibility in creating and upholding a difficult or impossible

living situation in refugee-producing countries. After all, the majority of migrants

seeking asylum in Europe are coming from countries that until recently where under

42 For an example, see Zygmunt Bauman, Strangers at Our Door (John Wiley & Sons, 2016); David Miller, Strangers in Our Midst (Harvard University Press, 2016).

43 “Missing Persons and Mediterranean Migration,” International Commission for Missing Persons, April 3, 2015, http://www.icmp.int/news/missing-persons-and-mediterranean-migration/.

44 The Editorial Board, “Europe Must Reform Its Deadly Asylum Policies,” The New York Times, August 31, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/01/opinion/europe-must-reform-its-deadly-asylum-policies.html.The Washington Post similarly notes that Europe “can’t be expected to solve on its own a problem that is originating in Afghanistan, Sudan, Libya and—above all—Syria.” Editorial Board, “A Refugee Crisis of Historic Scope,” The Washington Post, August 29, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-refugee-crisis-of-historic-scope/2015/08/29/3cc62592-4d9d-11e5-902f-39e9219e574b_story.html?utm_term=.afecaa65161f.

45 Miller, Strangers in Our Midst.46 Bauman, Strangers at Our Door, 15.

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colonial rule. Libya and Eritrea were Italian colonies until 1947; Somalia was ruled by

Italy and Britain until 1960; Syria was a French protectorate under the Mandate System

until 1946; Britain invaded and occupied Afghanistan three times until formal

independence in 1919. From the days of colonial conquest and genocide, to the

economic exploitation under the Mandate System, and recent years' interventions in

Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, any serious consideration of what lies behind the surge of

migrants into Europe must account for this colonial history and the way in which it

continues to structure the present. As Gurminder Bhambra makes clear, “Europe’s

relatively high standard of living and social infrastructure have not been established or

maintained separate from either the labour and wealth of others, or the creation of

misery elsewhere.”47 In fact, and as Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson have shown, the

origins of the EU are inextricably bound up with imperial politics and “the perceived

necessity to preserve and prolong the colonial system.”48 From the beginning of the Pan-

European movement in the 1920s to its institutionalisation in the European Economic

Community (EEC), European integration was inextricably bound up with the question

of Europe's continued dominance over Africa; indeed, “a unification of Europe and a

unified European effort to colonize Africa were two processes that presupposed one

another.”49 The 2008 agreement between Italy and Libya, in which Colonel Gaddafi

agreed to help curb migration flows in return for colonial reparations, is but a recent

example of how the historical reality of colonialism continues to pattern the present.

A focus on racial capitalism and the materiality of the global colour line sheds

new light on these processes. Two aspects in particular are worth highlighting. First, and

against those who insist on a neat separation between “genuine” refugees and

“economic migrants”, it is worth remembering that the contemporary surge in migration

is closely linked to the globalisation of neoliberal capital and labour stratifications in the

world economy. As Fran Cetti explains, global disparities in income levels, health,

education, and life expectancy

47 Gurminder Bhambra, “Europe Won’t Resolve the ‘migrant Crisis’ until It Faces Its Own Past,” The Conversation (blog), September 1, 2015, http://theconversation.com/europe-wont-resolve-the-migrant-crisis-until-it-faces-its-own-past-46555. As Reece Jones explains, what the European Left and Right both “miss is that it is not simply a migration crisis in Europe, but also a crisis created by Europe.” Reece Jones, “Europe’s Migration Crisis, or Open Borders as Reparations,” Versobooks.com, accessed December 10, 2017, https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2900-europe-s-migration-crisis-or-open-borders-as-reparations.

48 Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson, “Bringing Africa as a ‘Dowry to Europe,’” Interventions 13, no. 3 (September 1, 2011): 461, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2011.597600. See also Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson, Eurafrica: The Untold History of European Integration and Colonialism (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014).

49 Hansen and Jonsson, “Bringing Africa as a ‘Dowry to Europe.’”

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“have soared over the last thirty years of neoliberal policies, reaching a point today when they have never been higher. Poverty, unemployment and lack of opportunity have been entrenched in [developing] countries by decades of debt 'restructuring' imposed by Western states and financial institutions. The collapse of local economies and of formal and informal systems of survival in many countries in the Global South, and the unrelenting rise in rural dispossessions and urban unemployment, generate and are compounded by conflict and insecurity.”50

Since the 1970s the forceful integration of Asia, Africa, and Latin America into the

world economy has driven millions of poor peasants off their land and into urban

peripheries—with some reaching as far as the metropoles of Europe and North

America.51 Accumulation, dispossession, and migration must ultimately be analysed and

understood through a unified framework. As Hannah Cross explains, in the neoliberal

present

“people are thrown out of the global economy—discarded and sometimes reincorporated. Therefore, there are 'wasted lives' (Bauman 2004), people who are left behind by 'modernisation' and become unemployed, unpaid, imprisoned, destitute, lost at sea or perishing in the desert.”52

In other words, the violent displacement of millions of people in the global South is not

random or coincidental but a result of the forceful appropriation of land and resources in

Asia, Africa, and Latin America; “the dual processes of displacement and migration are

manufactured through the specific trajectories of colonialism and capitalism.”53

50 Fran Cetti, “Fortress Europe: The War against Migrants,” International Socialim: A Quarterly Review of Socialist Theory 148 (2015).

51 Structural adjustment programmes and public-sector downsizing imposed on the global South have, as Mike Davis point out in Planet of Slums, “been an inevitable recipe for the mass production of slums” by forcefully incorporating the subsistence peasantries in Asia and Africa into the world market. Struggling to compete with large-scale agroindustries, millions of farmers were forced from their land and driven into the cities to find work, if at all, in the informal sector. UN-Habitat similarly concludes that “the collapse of formal urban employment in the developing world and the rise of the informal sector is... a direct function of liberalization... Urban poverty has been increasing in most countries subject to structural adjustment programs.” See Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (Verso, 2007); United Nations Human Settlements Programme, The Challenge of Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements, 2003 (Earthscan Publications, 2003), 40.

52 Hannah Cross, “Labour and Underdevelopment? Migration, Dispossession and Accumulation in West Africa and Europe,” Review of African Political Economy 40, no. 136 (June 1, 2013): 215, https://doi.org/10.1080/03056244.2013.794727.

53 Harsha Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism (AK Press, 2014), 44. As Walia explains, it is imperative that we interrogate “the role of Western imperialism in dispossessing communities in order to secure land and resources for state and capitalist interests, as well as the deliberately limited inclusion of

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Second, and as we saw in chapter 3, the rise of global capitalism has historically

been linked to the production of unwaged and less-than-free labour, such as chattel

slavery, racialized indentured servitude, convict leasing, and debt peonage. As William

I. Robinson explains, “migration/immigration has thus been central to the creation of the

world capitalist system.”54 In the neoliberal present, these forms of direct, colonial

control over the global labour supply have been replaced, in part, by the creation of

“immigrant labor.” Indeed, despite widespread anti-immigrant rhetoric throughout the

global North, neither the state nor capital have an interest in closing down the border to

all migrants: the goal is not to prevent migration but to control and police it, locking

migrants into a state of permanent precarity, vulnerability, and super-exploitability. As

David McNally notes, “it's not that global business does not want immigrant labor to the

West. It simply wants this labor on its own terms: frightened, oppressed, vulnerable.”55

Xenophobic discourses and the criminalisation of undocumented migration enable a

division of the global working class into “immigrants” and “citizens.” Migrants are thus

constituted as a highly precarious, hyper-exploitable, and expendable work force; what

Peter Nyers refers to as the “deportspora.”56 What is at stake is the production of “a

subordinate reserve army of deportable 'foreign' labour, always-already within the space

of the nation-state, readily available for deployment as the inevitably over-employed

working poor.”57 The creation of such a super-exploited, hyper-surveilled, and

expendable labour pool is central to racial capitalism and the global political economy

in so far as it places downward pressure on wages everywhere and disciplines all

workers—Germany's 1 euro/hr job scheme is a case in point.58 As Robinson elaborates,

migrant bodies into Western states through processes of criminalization and racialization that justify the commodification of their labour.” Walia, 39.

54 Robinson, “Global Capitalism, Immigrant Labor, and the Struggle for Justice,” 2.55 David McNally, quoted in Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism, 70. 56 Peter Nyers, “Abject Cosmopolitanism: The Politics of Protection in the Anti-Deportation

Movement,” Third World Quarterly 24, no. 6 (2003): 1070. As William Robinson explains, “The transnational circulation of capital and the disruption and deprivation it causes, in turn, generates the transnational circulation of labour. In other words, global capitalism creates immigrant workers... In a sense, this must be seen as a coerced or forced migration, since global capitalism exerts a structural violence over whole populations and makes it impossible for them to survive in their homeland.” William Robinson, “Globalization and the Struggle for Immigrant Rights in the United States,” ZNet (blog), March 10, 2007, https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/globalization-and-the-struggle-for-immigrant-rights-in-the-united-states-by-william-robinson/. See also Hannah Cross, Migrants, Borders and Global Capitalism: West African Labour Mobility and EU Borders (Routledge, 2013); Nicholas De Genova, “Spectacles of Migrant ‘illegality’: The Scene of Exclusion, the Obscene of Inclusion,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 36, no. 7 (July 1, 2013): 1180–98, https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2013.783710; Angela Mitropoulos and Matthew Kiem, “Cross-Border Operations,” The New Inquiry (blog), November 18, 2015, https://thenewinquiry.com/cross-border-operations/.

57 Genova, “Spectacles of Migrant ‘illegality,’” 1190.58 “Germany Puts Refugees to Work ... for One Euro,” The Local, May 16, 2016,

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“Immigrant labor is extremely profitable for the transnational corporate economy in a double sense. First, it is labor that is highly vulnerable, forced to exist semi underground, and deportable, and therefore super-exploitable. Second, the criminalization of undocumented migrants and the militarization of their control not only reproduce these conditions of vulnerability but also in themselves generate vast new opportunities for accumulation. The private immigrant detention complex is a boom industry.”59

In light of this, while activist groups such as the CPB have been effective in

drawing attention to the “death worlds” that underlie and condition contemporary

Europe, their calls for hospitality, empathy, and affective identification with the fate of

migrants ultimately reproduce, rather than challenge, dominant interpretations that

portray Europe as an innocent bystander. In framing the migrant crisis as a problem of

inhumane Frontex policies and a society that turns a blind eye to suffering, these

interventions do little to challenge established interpretations that cast migrants as

“uninvited guests”, “charitable subjects”, and “strangers at our door.”60 This not only

obscures Europe's role in having created the conditions which, in part, have set in

motion the migration of today; as Broeck argues, it also reproduces dominant

interpretations that see Europe as the haven of democracy, liberty, and universal rights,

as opposed to “a colonialist product which guards its comparative wealth and guarantees

of freedom carefully, sheltered by broad mass approval of its hegemonic white citizenry,

and by the support of its intellectual elites.”61 Put differently, by divorcing the ongoing

crisis from Europe's long history of empire and racial capitalism, liberal pro-refugee

activism often end up depicting contemporary manifestations of racism and white

nationalism as exceptions to normality; as anachronisms, pathologies, and individual

attitudes—rather than as constitutive elements of European history, culture, identity, and

macroeconomics.62 As Nicholas De Genova explains, this reduces racism to little more

than a politics of discriminatory hostility towards difference. A discussion emptied of

https://www.thelocal.de/20160516/germany-puts-refugees-to-work-for-one-euro.59 Robinson, “Global Capitalism, Immigrant Labor, and the Struggle for Justice,” 9.60 Amongst others, see Bauman, Strangers at Our Door and Miller, Strangers in Our Midst.61 Broeck, “Commentary (In Response to Michel Feith),” 25.62 As Alana Lentin makes clear, Europe's contemporary exclusionary practices must be seen as

consistent and contiguous. Indeed, “the fact that none of the arguments that are constitutive of the case for closing the borders, deporting the undesirables, enforcing integration, or criminalising minority cultural practices are set in the politico-historical context out of which they emerge is striking.” Alana Lentin, “Postracial Silences: The Othering of Race in Europe,” in Racism and Sociology, ed. Wulf D. Hund and Alana Lentin (LIT Verlag Münster, 2014), 74.

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historical and materialist baggage, this forsakes “an analysis of the distinctively

European colonial legacies that literally produced race as a socio-political category of

distinction and discrimination in the first place.”63 In other words, while groups such as

the CPB do offer critiques of racism and populist nationalisms, they fail to situate these

critiques within a historical and materialist context that recognises the centrality of race

to European capitalist modernity. As De Genova asks: “If migrant lives do arguably

matter in Europe, why is it so persistently and perniciously difficult to reognize them as

Black lives?”64 These discourses not only evade the question what Michael Omi and

Howard Winant call “racial formation”, namely, the historical, political, and economic

processes through which racial categories are brought into being. As we shall see next,

they also enable Europe to continue to see itself as the pinnacle of freedom, democracy,

humanism—and, indeed, anti-racism.

White Innocence

In the previous section I argued that the majority of left-liberal responses to the

ongoing crisis in the Mediterranean have contributed to an ideological formation that

removes from view the interconnected, material histories that link Europe and the

migrants washed up on its shores. By foregrounding the spectacle of death and suffering

—emblematised by the circulation of the picture of 3-year old Syrian refugee Alan

Kurdi, lying dead and alone on a beach in Bodrum, Turkey—these discourses call on

Europeans to open their hearts, and to feel compassion and empathy with the suffering

of migrants. As we shall see, this focus on bodies in pain not only decontextualises and

dehistoricises the ongoing crisis: it also contributes to the construction of a particular

cultural narrative—of European goodness, humanity, and anti-racism. If there exists a

link between mourning and the mattering of human life, as Butler suggests, then this

raises questions around whose humanity is at stake and, indeed for what purpose.

Sarah Ahmed's work on stranger fetishism offers a good starting point for

thinking about these issues. In Strange Encounters, she explores how colonial amnesia

and the erasure of connected histories lead to the objectification of the stranger, that is,

to a “'cutting off' of figures from the social and material relations which overdetermine

63 Genova, “The ‘migrant Crisis’ as Racial Crisis,” 5. As he notes, it is striking that although the risks associated with crossing the Mediterranean are disproportionately inflicted on migrant and refugees from sub-Saharan Africa “the brute racial fact of the deadly European border regime is seldom acknowledged.”

64 Genova, 3.

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their existence.”65 This is a move that ontologises the stranger, and that turns him or her

“into something that simply is.” Ahmed argues that this is a logic that is shared by both

anti-immigrant and xenophobic policies, and liberal and multicultural discourses that

welcome strangers. Indeed, while liberal and multicultural discourses challenge

representations that frame the stranger as a source of danger, they take for granted “the

stranger's status as a figure that contains or has meaning.”66 The stranger is here turned

into a reminder of the difference, relationality, and vulnerability that is common to all of

us—as Bülent Diken argues, “with the stranger, we find ourselves.”67 Uncovering the

self-serving motives that underpin multicultural calls for welcoming the alien stranger,

Ahmed notes how

“the alien is a source of fascination and desire: making friends with aliens, eating with aliens, or even eating one (up), might enable us to transcend the very limits and frailties of an all-too-human form. Or, by allowing some aliens to co-exist “with us”, we might expand our community: we might prove our advancement into or beyond the human; we might demonstrate our willingness to accept difference and to make it our own. Being hospitable to aliens might, in this way, allow us to become human.”68

In her trilogy on national sentimentality, Lauren Berlant raises similar questions

about the limits of liberal and multicultural discourses of inclusion. Her argument

centres on how the language of emotions and the personal increasingly has come to

replace politics and responsibility. She describes this as a form of sentimental politics

that operates by burning the pain of excluded others “into the conscience of classically

privileged [...] subjects” in order to make them “feel the pain […] as their pain.”69

Berlant argues that this focus on the wounds, pain, and suffering of others works to turn

political problems into an affective matter to be solved through proper feeling, equating

structural change with feeling good. Sentimentality, she argues, must therefore be

understood as a political project launched on behalf of the beneficiaries of social

injustice, as a “defensive response by people who identify with privilege yet fear they

will be exposed as immoral by their tacit sanction of a particular structural violence that

65 Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (Routledge, 2000), 5.66 Ahmed, 4.67 Bülent Diken, Strangers, Ambivalence and Social Theory (Ashgate, 1998), 334.68 Ahmed, Strange Encounters, 2.69 Lauren Berlant, “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics,” in Cultural Pluralism,

Identity Politics, and the Law, ed. Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns (University of Michigan Press, 2001), 53.

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benefits them.”70 As Ahmed reminds us, such “cannibalisation of the other

masquerading as care”71 is made possible by historical amnesia and the erasure of

history, because only by obscuring the privilege obtained through colonial conquest,

genocide, and racial subordination can the white subject present itself as empathetic,

caring, and good.

Applying Ahmed and Berlant's arguments to the Mediterranean crisis, it becomes

possible to see how pro-refugee appeals to affect, liberal hospitality, and

multiculturalism ultimately function as continuations of, rather than breaks with, the key

premises of the populist, far right, anti-immigrant, xenophobic, and racist political

parties they supposedly seek to challenge. While many of the pro-refugee groups and

activists discussed above challenge the xenophobic discourses that present migrants as a

form of danger (to Europe's security, welfare state, women, and so on), they rely on a

similar fetishising logic. In seeking to extend “grief and care to the dead stranger”,72

these interventions not only transform the migrant into a predetermined universalised

figure in need of Europe's help and hospitality: they also reproduce a narrative of

European goodness and benevolence. As Saucier points out, this kind of activism might

ultimately not be about migrants at all but, rather, “about constructing a new European

citizen” by highlighting the difference between “good whiteness” (tolerant,

multicultural, liberal) and “bad whiteness” (fascist, white nationalist). Dead migrants, he

argues, here function as the conduit through which a more positive, cosmopolitan, and

empathetic European identity can be created, one that supposedly is attuned to the

suffering of all of humankind, but which in reality is concerned with saving Europe for

itself.73

Leftist philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek's commitment to a culturalist

Europeanism can be understood in precisely this vein. While Žižek is critical of anti-

immigrant discourses and committed to a policy of open borders, he calls on the Left to

“embrace its radical Western roots”:

“Europe needs to be open to refugees, but we have to be clear they are in

70 Berlant, 83–4.71 Quoted in Clare Hemmings, “Affective Solidarity: Feminist Reflexivity and Political Transformation,”

Feminist Theory 13, no. 2 (2012): 152, https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700112442643.72 Bieberstein and Evren, “From Aggressive Humanism to Improper Mourning,” 461.73 See Broeck and Saucier, “A Dialogue: On European Borders, Black Movement, and the History of

Social Death.” and Saucier and Woods, “Ex Aqua.” See also Gada Mahrouse, Conflicted Commitments: Race, Privilege, and Power in Solidarity Activism (McGill-Queen’s Press - MQUP, 2014), which examines solidarity as a colonial encounter that produces First World subjectivities.

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our culture. Certain ethical limits... are non-negotiable. We should be more assertive toward our values... Europe means something noble—human rights, welfare state, social programs for the poor. All of this is embodied in enlightenment of the European legacy.”74

By erasing Europe's colonial past and its neocolonial present—and with that, the

responsibility that Europe bears for the bodies on its shores— Žižek not only reproduces

hegemonic discourses that see Europe as the pinnacle of democracy, liberty, and

universal rights. By securing the migrant's status as a stranger, he also enables the

European subject to re-constitute itself as “ethical” and “good”, innocent of its

imperialist histories and present complicities. Like activist groups such as the CPB,

Zizek thus sanctions a white(washed) sense of self and satisfied way of being in the

world—what Gloria Wekker describes as “white innocence”—that sees little or no

relation between current social advantages and the long history of empire, imperialism,

and racial capitalism.75 Hence the focus on migrants that are dead, with sentimental

stories of innocent children washed up on shores, and with mothers who drown while

giving birth—that is, with bodies that cannot speak back. As Broeck argues, these are

the “waves of white empathy” that come “washing up when things get all too obviously

horrible for black so-called illegal migrants.”76

Near and Far Peripheries: Connected Geographies of Resistance

So far I argued that dominant forms of pro-refugee activism in Europe elide and

neglect the role of race, colonialism, and global capitalism in creating the ongoing

migrant crisis. The result has been a solidarity which grieves and welcomes migrants as

universal humans—and not as victims of a shared, global present built on racial

capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy. This choice is not innocent because, as

Bhambra reminds us, “addressing particular sets of connections leads to particular

understandings”, and as such it is imperative to consider “why certain connections were

initially chosen and why choosing others could lead to more adequate explanations.”77

In chapter 4 I argued that a materialist reading of the global colour line opens up space

for a different kind of solidarity—based not on the connections forged from the

74 “‘EU Must Militarize Chaotic Immigration, Identify States behind Middle East Crisis’ – Zizek to RT,” RT International, accessed December 10, 2017, https://www.rt.com/news/340562-eu-refugee-policy-chaos-militarization/.

75 Gloria Wekker, White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race (Duke University Press, 2016).76 Broeck, “Commentary (In Response to Michel Feith),” 32.77 Gurminder K. Bhambra, Connected Sociologies (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014), 5.

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ontological universal experience of vulnerability and mourning, but on resistance to

interlocking oppressions under racial capitalism. In the context of the ongoing European

migrant or refugee “crisis”, solidarity thus understood requires a shift in focus, away

from the interconnectedness and oneness of humanity—metaphorised by the umbilical

cord that connects Yohanna to her lifeless baby—towards the material entanglements

that link Europe to the diverse regions from which migrants and refugees are coming. In

the words of Stuart Hall: “They are here because you were there. There is an umbilical

connection. There is no understanding Englishness without understanding its imperial

and colonial dimensions.”78

A number of activist groups—including Black Lives Matter UK, Parti des

Indigènes de la République, New Urban Collective, European Network Against Racism,

and Campaign Against Police and State Violence—are practising precisely such a

radicalised and revolutionary form of solidarity. In the same way that Cedric Robinson

insisted on reading the plantations of Mississippi and the factories of Manchester not as

separate systems but as differentiated and complementary parts of the same global

economy, these activist groups are placing the ongoing migrant crisis within a broader

historical context of anti-racist struggles within and outside of Europe. These groups are

doing the critical work of contesting what Harsha Walia describes as “border

imperialism”; that is, the way in which the politics of borders are intimately intwined

with global systems of power and repression—at once at home and abroad—which find

their roots in colonisation, slavery, and capital accumulation and exploitation.79 In what

follows I focus on the work of two of these groups—Black Lives Matter UK and Parti

des Indigènes de la République—in order to demonstrate how an analysis of the co-

constitution of near and far peripheries under racial capitalism opens up space for a

different kind of internationalism and politics of solidarity.

On September 6, 2016, BLM UK shut down London City Airport by blocking a

runway. In a video posted on Twitter, the group called for cuts in carbon omissions,

arguing that climate change is a racial crisis.80 While the countries most liable

historically for global warming are located in the global North, many of the countries

most significantly affected by global warming are in sub-Saharan Africa. UNHCR

78 Stuart Hall, Black Chronicles II, ii, accessed January 9, 2017, http://autograph-abp.co.uk/exhibitions/black-chronicles-ii.

79 Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism.80 Matthew Weaver and Jamie Grierson, “Black Lives Matter Protest Stops Flights at London City

Airport,” The Guardian, September 6, 2016, sec. UK news, http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/sep/06/black-lives-matter-protesters-occupy-london-city-airport-runway.

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estimates that an annual average of 21.5 million people have been forcibly displaced

since 2008 due to climate-induced hazards, including droughts, mass flooding, and

desertification.81 By linking global warming to migrant fatalities, and contrasting the

ease by which “a tiny elite can fly to and from London City airport, sometimes as a

daily commute”82 with the deadly journeys undertaken by migrants as they try to enter

Europe, BLM UK thus connect their own struggle against racial capitalism,

marginalisation, and state violence in Britain to the global policing of migration flows.

The group has also organised against abuse perpetrated during immigrant detention,

incarceration, and deportation, as well as against state-sanctioned Islamophobia through

the Prevent strategy and the escalation of post-Brexit anti-immigrant hate crimes.83

Parti des Indigènes de la République (PIR) has similarly drawn attention to the

continuity between mass migrant deaths during the crossings of the Mediterranean and

the everyday violence inflicted on racialized minorities within Europe. PIR was formed

in early 2005 with the goal of contributing to “the emergence of a political and

organized expression of the rage of immigrant populations.”84 PIR is primarily

composed of French youths of African, Arab, Muslim, Maghrebian and Antillean origin,

born and raised in France, who live the experience of racism, marginalisation, and

exploitation. The French term “indigéne”—loosely translated as indigenous—was

chosen to invoke the colonial populations who, up until 1946, were governed by the

Code de l'Indigénat. The notion of “indigéne” ultimately draws attention to the fact that

the French Republic—while claiming to uphold colour-blind values of equality,

fraternity, and liberty—in fact continues to treat some of its citizens as quasi-colonial

subjects. As Horuia Bouteldja, the spokesperson of PIR, explains:

“When they refuse to accept us as French citizens, they deny us equality. We need to name this reality: we cannot be French, so we are native. We are second-class citizens; ours is a lumpen-citizenship, just as at the time of the colonies. This imaginary linked to colonization and the history of

81 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, “Frequently Asked Questions on Climate Change and Disaster Displacement,” UNHCR, accessed December 9, 2017, http://www.unhcr.org/news/latest/2016/11/581f52dc4/frequently-asked-questions-climate-change-disaster-displacement.html.

82 Alexandra Wanjiku Kelbert, “Climate Change Is a Racist Crisis: That’s Why Black Lives Matter Closed an Airport | Alexandra Wanjiku Kelbert,” The Guardian, September 6, 2016, sec. Opinion, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/06/climate-change-racist-crisis-london-city-airport-black-lives-matter.

83 See Genova, “The ‘migrant Crisis’ as Racial Crisis,” 4.84 Sadri Khiari, quoted in Stefan Kipfer, “Decolonization in the Heart of Empire: Some Fanonian Echoes

in France Today,” Antipode 43, no. 4 (September 1, 2011): 1158, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2011.00851.x.

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slavery continues to determine how they perceive us, for the body of the indigenous was constructed during the colonial era. As long as this imaginary is alive, we remain native.”85

For PIR, the legacies of race and colonialism continue to structure present realities in

Europe: from the dark waters of the Mediterranean, where migrants are left to die, to the

banlieues of Paris, to be Black in Europe is to be disposable.

In contrast to hegemonic forms of solidarity, PIR and BLM UK both disrupt

hegemonic narratives that see Europe as the bastion of democracy, liberty, and universal

rights. They do this by articulating their critiques of the current migration crisis within a

wider analysis of European empire, racial capitalism, labour exploitation, and

(neo)colonialism. As Walia explains with reference to No One Is Illegal, groups such as

these contest “the capitalist and colonial logics that make immigration an issue in the

first place.”86 BLM UK and PIR are struggling for more than recognition or inclusion

within the European polity, because the integrationist logic of immigration reduces

racism to an individual mentality or exception from normality. Instead they target three

specific problems: first, the problem of racism, stigmatisation, and marginalisation

within Europe; second, the role of racism in creating a super-exploitative work force

both within and outside of Europe; and three, the necessity of linking anti-racist struggle

within Europe to internationalist liberation struggles worldwide.87 By connecting near

and far peripheries these groups are ultimately challenging established geographies of

power. Where IR's state-centric imagination treats colonial frontiers and Western

“homelands” as fundamentally separate domains, these groups insist on linking the

struggle against capitalism and racist oppression within Europe to the deaths on its

borders. As Prem Rajaram explains, this

“allows for thinking points of articulation between different marginalised groups, refuses the state-centric account of migrant and refugee 'governance,' and allows also for the basis of a politics of solidarity. Such solidarity is framed around the refusal of a divisive politics of race that seeks to establish animosity between classes similarly positioned before capitalist systems of production.”88

In linking together metropolitan cores and colonial peripheries, activist groups such as

85 Quoted in Kipfer, 1158.86 Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism, ix.87 Kipfer, “Decolonization in the Heart of Empire,” 1162.88 Prem Kumar Rajaram, “Refugees as Surplus Population: Race, Migration and Capitalist Value

Regimes,” New Political Economy 23, no. 5 (September 3, 2018): 11, https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2017.1417372.

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PIR and BLM UK ultimately open up space for a different forms of solidarity: for an

internationalism that subverts the national “we” and that brings together migrants,

refugees, workers, and European minorities (Blacks, Muslims, women, Roma, Sami,

and so on) in joint struggle. This is a solidarity which goes beyond liberal notions of

hospitality, empathy, multiculturalism, and the eventual “creation of a new reserve army

of precarious labor”;89 a solidarity which instead seeks a revolutionary transformation of

contemporary Europe through a shared struggle against racism, patriarchy, capitalism,

oppression, and exploitation. As Turhan and Armiero explain, what is at stake is a

choice between

“a liberal way of dealing with migration as a temporary crisis that can be managed with the likes of the EU–Turkey migrant deal and a revolutionary perspective that embraces migration as an opportunity to break away from border-bound definitions of citizenship and create a truly cosmopolitan, responsible, and welcoming solidarity.”90

Conclusion

Speaking at a conference in 2016, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon insisted

that we are “facing the biggest refugee and displacement crisis of our time.” The refugee

or migrant crisis, he argued, is more than “a crisis in numbers”; in fact, “it is also a crisis

of solidarity.”91

What form of solidarity has been at stake in this crisis? In this chapter I have

argued that the majority of European calls for solidarity with shipwrecked migrants have

worked to evade the larger historical and material context of the global migration crisis.

While European pro-refugee activists, scholars, and policymakers have harnessed the

rhetoric of mourning, compassion, and empathy to challenge the xenophobic and white

nationalist discourses that figure migrants as vermin, pariah, and bogus—that is, as less-

than-human—they have often and inadvertently ended up reproducing the underlying

assumptions of the far right: namely, that migrants are “strangers”, “charitable subjects”,

and “uninvited guests.” By focusing on abstract—as opposed to historical—humanity,

solidarity practiced this way contributes to an ideological formation that not only fails to

connect the geo-politics of war and displacement to Europe's own macroeconomic and

89 Turhan and Armiero, “Cutting the Fence, Sabotaging the Border,” 2.90 Turhan and Armiero, 7.91 Ban Ki-Moon, “Refugee Crisis about Solidarity, Not Just Numbers, Secretary-General Says at Event

on Global Displacement Challenge” (UN Press Release, April 15, 2016), https://www.un.org/press/en/2016/sgsm17670.doc.htm.

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foreign policies. It also undoes the “umbilical cord” that links Europe and the migrants

that are trying to enter the continent. The result has been a shift in focus, from questions

of European responsibility, guilt, restitution, repentance, and structural reform to matters

of empathy, generosity, and hospitality—a move that ultimately transforms the

responsible colonial agent into an innocent bystander, and thus confirms its status as

“ethical”, “good”, and “humane.” If the migrant crisis, as Zygmunt Bauman has

suggested, “is humanity's crisis”92, then this raises questions about whose humanity is at

stake and, indeed, for what purposes.

In contrast to these perspectives, groups such as Black Lives Matter UK and

Parti des Indigènes de la République point towards an alternative, revolutionary politics

of solidarity that takes seriously the racialized political economy of migration and that is

painfully aware of how immigrant workers have “become the archetype of the new

global class relations; the quintessential workforce of global capitalism.”93 This is a

solidarity grounded less in the connections generated by universal ethics than in a

recognition of the intertwined histories that arise out of the colonial past and the

neocolonial present—summed up by the activist slogan “we didn't cross the border, the

border crossed us.” These groups not only challenge hegemonic narratives that see

Europe as the bastion of democracy, liberty, and universal rights: they also point

towards an alternative form of solidarity and internationalism, beyond the “master's

tools.” In Christina Sharpe's formulation,

“Refuse reconciliation to ongoing brutality. Refuse to feast on the corpse of others. Rend the fabric of the kinship narrative. Imagine otherwise. Remake the world. Some of us have never had any other choice.”94

In the next chapter I turn to Black internationalist thought and recent forms of Black-

Palestinian solidarity to deepen this analysis of how new forms of solidarity and

internationalism are brought into being from below.

92 Brad Evans and Zygmunt Bauman, “The Refugee Crisis Is Humanity’s Crisis,” The New York Times, May 2, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/02/opinion/the-refugee-crisis-is-humanitys-crisis.html.

93 Robinson, “Global Capitalism, Immigrant Labor, and the Struggle for Justice,” 8.94 Christina Sharpe, “Lose Your Kin,” The New Inquiry, November 16, 2016,

http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/lose-your-kin/.

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C H A P T E R 6

#Palestine2Ferguson: Empire and the Global Security Archipelago

“The young people of Ferguson struggle relentlessly, not just to win justice for Mike Brown or to end police misconduct but to dismantle racism once and for all, to bring

down the Empire, and to ultimately end War. As they reach out to Palestine, and Palestine reaches back to Ferguson, the potential for a new basis for solidarity is being

born—one rooted in revolution.”—Robin D.G. Kelley1

“I was born a Black woman and now

I am become a Palestinian against the relentless laughter of evil

there is less and less living room and where are my loved ones?

It is time to make our way home.”—June Jordan2

Introduction

In June 2016, the British-Sri Lankan hip hop artist M.I.A. was dropped as the

headline act for the London Afropunk festival. The decision came as a response to

comments she had made two months earlier about Beyoncé's Black Power-inspired

Super Bowl performance. “It's interesting”, she said,

“that in America the problem you're allowed to talk about is Black Lives Matter. It's not a new thing to me—it's what Lauryn Hill was saying in the 1990s, or Public Enemy in the 1980s. Is Beyoncé or Kendrick Lamar going to say Muslim Lives Matter? Or Syrian Lives Matter? Or this kid in Pakistan matters? That's a more interesting question.”3

As her comments went viral, Tumblr and Twitter exploded. Some criticised her for

trying to devalue the Black Lives Matter movement and minimise the issues faced by

Black people in the United States.4 Some argued that her comments could be “read

1 Robin D. G. Kelley, “Yes, I Said ‘National Liberation,’” www.counterpunch.org, February 24, 2016, https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/24/yes-i-said-national-liberation/.

2 June Jordan, Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Copper Canyon Press, 2012), 400.

3 Guardian music, “Singer MIA Faces Criticism for Comments on Beyoncé and Black Lives Matter,” The Guardian, April 21, 2016, sec. Music, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/apr/21/mia-black-lives-matter-comments-beyonce-refugees-criticism.

4 “M.I.A Slams Beyonce & #BlackLivesMatter,” That Grape Juice, accessed May 29, 2017,

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directly as anti-black racism”,5 while others concluded that “this MIA thing is a good

reminder that brown people need to work just as hard keeping their cousins in check as

they do white folks.”6 As pressures for a boycott built up, Afropunk announced that they

had decided to drop her as the headline act. “I've been told to stay in my lane”,7 M.I.A.

later explained.

A similar debate erupted in 2015 when three young Muslims were gunned down

in Chapel Hill and the Twitter hashtag #MuslimLivesMatter was introduced. Several

activists responded on social media by urging people not to use the hashtag, which they

described as an “appropriation” of the ongoing Black movement. As one commentator

explained:

“This is not at all to undermine or belittle the injustices that other minority groups in this country deal with every day; in fact, it is quite the opposite. Every community deserves to be able to think critically about their own positions in America, about their own challenges, about their own experiences, and in their own terms. Of course Muslim lives are under fire in our American systems. There is no question about that. However, building off the #BlackLivesMatter trend equates struggles that are, though seemingly similar, drastically different.”8

In this chapter I take the controversy surrounding M.I.A. and the

#MuslimLivesMatter hashtag as a starting point for thinking about what it means to

bring geographically dispersed struggles into a shared horizon. Focusing on the

solidarity that in recent years has been uniting Black radicalism with the Palestinian

liberation struggle, I argue that the main problem with M.I.A.'s comments is not so

much that they suggested that a movement for Muslim lives is more urgent than the

contemporary Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. The problem, rather, it is that her

comments implied, and were interpreted as suggesting, that the struggles for Black and

Muslim lives are fundamentally distinct and separate. In what follows I argue that such

an interpretation is misleading, and that recent protests against police brutality and mass

http://thatgrapejuice.net/2016/04/mia-slams-beyonce-blacklivesmatter/.5 “M.I.A. Made a Dumb, Clumsy Statement About Black Lives Matter,” Jezebel, accessed May 29,

2017, http://jezebel.com/m-i-a-made-a-dumb-clumsy-statement-about-black-lives-1772262968.6 “M.I.A.’s Critique of Beyoncé and Black Lives Matter Had Black Twitter Upset,” accessed May 29,

2017, https://mic.com/articles/141472/black-twitter-is-not-here-for-m-i-a-s-criticism-of-beyonc-and-black-lives-matter.

7 Guardian music, “MIA Says She Won’t Play Afropunk Festival after Black Lives Matter Comments,” The Guardian, June 21, 2016, sec. Music, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jun/21/mia-says-she-wont-play-afropunk-festival-black-lives-matter-comments.

8 Quoted in Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Haymarket Books, 2016), 187.

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incarceration within the United States are better thought of as a domestic instance of a

global struggle against imperial violence, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism.

From W.E.B Du Bois to Assata Shakur to Tupac, Black radicals have a long history of

drawing connections between the racism they face at home and the expansion of empire

abroad. In Du Bois formulation, the “Black condition in the United States is but a local

phase of a global problem.”9 To recognise these intersecting logics is to open up space

for a counter-history of transnational activism and resistance, grounded not in sameness

and a flattening out of differences, but on the global, interconnected character of

freedom struggles.

9 Quoted in Natalie J. Ring, The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State, 1880-1930 (University of Georgia Press, 2012), 203.

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The chapter develops this argument in four sections. I begin by illustrating how

(white) liberal commentators predominantly have portrayed BLM as a domestic

movement struggling for access and reform: that is, for a more inclusive version of the

American dream. Drawing on abolitionist scholars such as Angela Davis and Ruth

Wilson Gilmore, I show that this focus on “recognition politics” elides the distinct class

character of BLM as well as the ways in which the penal and national security state has

come to function as a catchall solution to the systemic problems of racial capitalism,

including mass homelessness, unemployment, mental illness, and drug addition. The

second section places this analysis in a global frame, and argues that racialized state

violence against US domestic minorities is intimately connected to imperial overseas

missions in and neocolonial exploitation of the global South. As Black internationalists

such as Malcolm X, Huey Newton, and Stokeley Carmichael argued, American anti-

Blackness is not exceptional but part of a global racial regime firmly rooted in the

history of racial capitalism, imperialism, and settler colonialism. In the third section I

undertake a more thorough analysis of the intimate linkages between racial violence at

home and abroad, showing how the contemporary policing of Black and other working

class communities in the US builds on explicitly colonial models of pacification,

militarisation, and control. The issue here is not that racism elsewhere mimics that in the

United States—and thus that, say, Brazil, occupied Palestine, and South Africa are like

America—but, rather, that these heterogeneous geographies are linked through the

overlapping logic of racial capitalism. The final section brings these arguments together

through a discussion of the Black-Palestinian international and the entangled

geographies of resistance that bring urban Black America and occupied Palestine into a

shared horizon.

Citizen? An American Dream

On 9 August 2014, Michael Brown was shot dead by a white police officer in

Ferguson, Missouri. Unarmed and with his hands raised above his head, Brown was

pierced by at least six bullets and left lying in public view on the street for four hours,

visible to anyone passing by.10 The following day a makeshift memorial was created on

the bloodstained spot where he had died. As neighbourhood residents and others

10 Julie Bosman and Joseph Goldstein, “Timeline for a Body: 4 Hours in the Middle of a Ferguson Street,” The New York Times, August 23, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/us/michael-brown-a-bodys-timeline-4-hours-on-a-ferguson-street.html.

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gathered together, the police soon appeared, smashing the assembled candles and

flowers with their vehicles.11 The memorial, begun in silence and peace, quickly turned

into a political protest as locals began to hold a vigil, block off traffic, and march down

the streets.

In the days, months, and years that have followed that fateful August day, the

local outrage in Ferguson has grown into a nationwide conversation about the

relationship between law enforcement and Black communities. Tanisha Anderson,

Sandra Bland, Rekia Boyd, Michael Brown, Philando Castile, Eric Garner, Oscar Grant,

Freddie Gray, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Alton Sterling, and countless

others: in the United States a Black person is killed by a law enforcement officer every

28 hours.12 Black Lives Matter, which began as a Twitter hashtag, has emerged as a

nationwide movement committed to unveiling and resisting police brutality, mass

incarceration, and the systematic criminalisation of Black life—what Michelle

Alexander calls the era of the “new Jim Crow.”13 As literary writer Claudia Rankine

documents, to be identified as Black by the US police is to be subject to hyper-

surveillance and an extensive list of permitted behaviour: “no hands in your pockets, no

playing music, no sudden movements, no driving your car, no walking at night, no

walking in the day, no turning onto this street, no entering this building, no standing

your ground, no standing here, no standing there, no talking back, no playing with toy

guns, no living while black.”14 In challenging Black death at the hands of the police,

BLM campaigners and organisers are ultimately calling into question, not just how

individuals like Michael Brown or Sandra Bland died, but also and more fundamentally,

the conditions under which they were forced to live.15 Racialized police brutality is part

11 Mark Follman, “Michael Brown’s Mom Laid Flowers Where He Was Shot—and Police Crushed Them,” Mother Jones, accessed November 24, 2016, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/08/ferguson-st-louis-police-tactics-dogs-michael-brown.

12 Arlene Eisen, “Operation Ghetto Storm: 2012 Annual Report on the Extrajudicial Killing of 313 Black People by Police, Security Guards and Vigilantes” (Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, 2012), http://www.operationghettostorm.org.According to the Guardian, in 2015 the number of young black men killed by the police was five times higher than white men of the same age. See Jon Swaine et al., “Young Black Men Killed by US Police at Highest Rate in Year of 1,134 Deaths,” The Guardian, December 31, 2015, sec. US news, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/31/the-counted-police-killings-2015-young-black-men.

13 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press, 2013). See also Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Harvard University Press, 2016) and Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (Oxford University Press, 2014).

14 Claudia Rankine, “‘The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning,’” The New York Times, June 22, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/22/magazine/the-condition-of-black-life-is-one-of-mourning.html.

15 Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton, Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (Verso Books, 2016), 1.

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of a lager structure which systematically “protects and benefits white people at the

expense of people of color”16, not just in law enforcement and criminal justice, but also

in healthcare, education, culture, and economic and environmental security. Virtually all

indicators—including life expectancy, collage graduation rates, infant mortality rates,

prison sentences, SAT scores, unemployment rates, and wealth accumulation—tell the

same story of Black disadvantage: Blacks are 39% of the homeless population, while

only compromising 12 % of the overall population17; they are more than twice as likely

to be unemployed than their white counterparts18; 34% of all Black children live in

poverty, compared to 12% of white children19; the median wealth of a white household

is 10 times that of Blacks.20 The fact that Eric Garner and Alton Sterling were both

killed while working on the street to make ends meet—Garner selling loose cigarettes,

Sterling CDs—highlight the poor living conditions of many Black Americans.

While reactions to BLM have been varied—most notoriously, some have pushed

back using the slogan All Lives Matter—the majority of (white) liberal commentators

have interpreted the movement through the lens of “recognition politics”: that is, as a

struggle to extend basic liberal rights to all members of society and gain recognition for

an injured identity.21 David McIvor, for example, has argued that BLM must be

understood as a struggle for democratic citizenship.22 Due to its deeply rooted history of

exclusion, American citizenship is still unevenly experienced. BLM thus functions as a

form of “democratic pedagogy” that seeks to remake norms of citizenship. A similar

view is expressed by Ta-Nehisi Coates in his book Between the World and Me. Offering

a penetrating critique of the American dream, Coates argues that Black Americans

historically have been barred from being citizens: indeed, “[i]n America, it is traditional

16 Paul Gorski, “Ferguson and the Violence of ‘It’s-All-About-Me’ White Liberalism,” in The Assault on Communities of Color: Exploring the Realities of Race-Based Violence, ed. Kenneth J. Fasching-Varner and Nicholas Daniel Hartlep (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 35.

17 “RACIAL DISPARITIES IN HOMELESSNESS IN THE UNITED STATES” (National Alliance to End Homelessness in the United States, June 6, 2018).

18 Bureau of Labour Statistics, “Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey” (United States Department of Labor, July 6, 2018), https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cpsee_e16.htm.

19 “Children in Poverty by Race and Ethnicity” (KIDS COUNT Data Center, 2016), https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/44-children-in-poverty-by-race-and-ethnicity#detailed/1/any/false/870,573,869,36,868,867,133,38,35,18/10,11,9,12,1,185,13/324,323.

20 “How Wealth Inequality Has Changed in the U.S. since the Great Recession, by Race, Ethnicity and Income” (Pew Research Center, 2017), http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/11/01/how-wealth-inequality-has-changed-in-the-u-s-since-the-great-recession-by-race-ethnicity-and-income/.

21 For example, see “#BlackLivesMatter: The Birth of a New Civil Rights Movement,” The Guardian, accessed May 29, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/19/blacklivesmatter-birth-civil-rights-movement.

22 See “Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Work of Mourning” in David W. McIvor, Mourning in America: Race and the Politics of Loss (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016).

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to destroy the black body—it is heritage.” As he explains,

“[T]he tradition of attacking the citizenship rights of African-Americans extends from slave codes to state-wide bans on black residence to black codes to debt peonage to literacy tests, to felon disenfranchisement. You literally can trace attacks on black citizenship from the very origins of American citizenship itself, up into the present day.”23

Coates's solution is a more inclusive American dream, and “a healing of the American

psyche... what I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual

renewal... A revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image

as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.”24 For Coates, reparations and a

closing of the wealth gap are crucial to this project of “imagin[ing] a new country.”25

Other commentators have been less enthusiastic about BLM. Mark Lilla, for

example, has accused it of using “Mau-Mau tactics to put down dissent” and for being

“indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life.”26

Constituting a prime example of “identity politics”, for Lilla BLM is “a textbook

example of how not to build solidarity.”27 Taking a slightly more sympathetic stance,

David Harvey argues that the movement for Black lives is rooted in the search for

recognition. While the struggle against extrajudicial killings of Black people by police is

not without its merits, it ultimately falls short of being the broad and far-reaching

movement that is needed to challenge and transform capitalist society; “frankly I don’t

see the current struggles in Ferguson as dealing very much in anti-capitalism.”28 For

Harvey, BLM is thus qualitatively different from Occupy Wall Street, which for him

constitutes the “nemesis” of capitalist class power.29

In spite of their apparent differences, thinkers such as Harvey and Lilla, on the

one hand, and McIvor and Coates, on the other, actually share an understanding of BLM

23 Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Longest War,” The Atlantic, May 4, 2011, https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/05/the-longest-war/238334/. See also

24 Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic, June 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/.

25 Coates.26 David Remnick, “A Conversation With Mark Lilla on His Critique of Identity Politics,” The New

Yorker, August 25, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/a-conversation-with-mark-lilla-on-his-critique-of-identity-politics.

27 Remnick.28 “Symposium: Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism,” Syndicate (blog), accessed March

20, 2018, https://syndicate.network/symposia/theology/seventeen-contradictions-and-the-end-of-capitalism/.

29 David Harvey, “The Party of Wall Street Meets Its Nemesis,” Versobooks.com, accessed March 20, 2018, https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/777-david-harvey-the-party-of-wall-street-meets-its-nemesis.

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as a domestic integrationist project: that is, as a struggle for access, reform, and

inclusion—that is, for recognition. None of these writers make any serious attempt to

link the question of race within the US to broader global structures, such as world

poverty, the globalisation of neoliberalism, and the “war on terror.” This is in contrast to

the actual BLM movement, which has continued to make explicit links between white

supremacy, imperialism, and global capitalism: indeed, the core message of Black Youth

Project 100 (BYP100) is that “Racial Justice is Economic Justice”; Umi Selah of Dream

Defenders has linked racialized domestic inequality to US military operations overseas,

calling on the US government to “not engage in wars where we perpetuate an economic

system that ruins democracy around the world”; and Alicia Garza, one of the founders

of the Black Lives Matter hashtag, has stated that “for the first time in a long time, we

are talking about alternatives to capitalism.”30 To depict BLM as a form of identity

politics—and, thus, as a movement with little or no interest in challenging the logic of

capital—is not only to ignore that many of the movement's key figures have a

background in labour organising and other economic justice campaigns. It also

overlooks that race, in Stuart Hall's memorable formulation, “is the modality in which

class is lived.”31 As Cedric Robinson reminds us, race-making practices are intrinsic to

capital accumulation, because racism supplies the precarious and exploitable lives

capitalism needs to extract land and labour. Capitalism relies on race to split humanity

into those associated with property, citizenship, and wages, and those subjected to

super-exploitation and dispossession. Rather than an embarrassment residue of pre-

capitalist social relations, racial differences are constitutive of capital, because processes

of capital accumulation are themselves predicated on the devaluation of Black and other

non-white people.

To read the contemporary criminalisation of Black lives—as well as of other

racialized minorities, including Latinx, Muslims, and First Nations32—through the lens

30 “BYP100: Our Impact,” n.d., https://byp100.org/our-impact-2/; Lawrence Ross, Blackballed: The Black and White Politics of Race on America’s Campuses (St. Martin’s Press, 2016), 226; “A Q&A With Alicia Garza, Co-Founder of #BlackLivesMatter,” The Nation, Mach 2015, https://www.thenation.com/article/qa-alicia-garza-co-founder-blacklivesmatter/ .

31 Stuart Hall, “Race, Articulation, and Socities Structured in Dominance,” in Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, ed. Houston A. Baker Jr, Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg (University of Chicago Press, 1996), 55.

32 Native Americans are in fact more likely than other racial groups to be killed by law enforcement. While American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians make up just 0.8% of the American population, they are the victims in 1.9% of police killings—a mortality rate that is 12% higher than for Blacks, and three times the rate of whites. Native Americans in fact make up three of the top five top age-group killed by police. See “The Forgotten Minority in Police Shootings,” CNN, November 13, 2017, http://edition.cnn.com/2017/11/10/us/native-lives-matter/index.html.

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of racial capitalism is ultimately to pay close attention to the neoliberal context of

structural unemployment, concentrated urban poverty, and mass homelessness. As

prison abolitionists such as Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis have shown,

racialized state violence (inflicted on Black, Hispanic, Muslim, and Native American

lives) emerged as a solution to the problem of how to manage the devastating

consequences of the neoliberal economy.33 Over the past 40 years, the US economy has

undergone a fundamental shift, from Fordism—characterised by mass production,

industrial factories, assembly lines, and bureaucratised unions—to neoliberalism and the

belief in laissez-faire solutions to social and economic problems. Since the 1980s,

millions of industrial working-class jobs have been lost as a result of deindustrialisation,

globalisation, and capital flight. As manufacturing's share of US GDP declined from

28% in 1950 to 12% in 2012, unemployment rates have sharply increased, particularly

in industries such as auto, rubber, and steel.34 Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous workers,

whose vulnerable position in the US economy often make them “last to be hired, first to

be fired”, were hardest hit by these transformations. The Black unemployment rate is

currently twice as high as for whites, and more than 20% of young Black workers are

currently without a job.35 As Jordan Camp summarises “the transition to neoliberalism

has led to extreme polarization of wealth, an expanding planet of slums, and the

formation of the largest carceral state on the planet.”36

The state's organised political response to this social and economic crisis has,

above all, been to criminalise poor people and people of colour. Having abandoned the

liberal welfare state and Keynesian economic policies, the neoliberal state has come to

rely on the criminal justice system. As Patrisse Cullors, one of the founders of BLM,

makes clear, “the police have become judge, juror and executioner. They've become the

social worker. They've become the mental health clinician. They've become anything

and everything that has to do with the everyday life of mostly black and brown poor

33 Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California Press, 2007); Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy : Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture, 1st ed. (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005). See also Alex Vitale, The End of Policing (Verso Books, 2018).

34 See Jordan T. Camp, Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State (Univ of California Press, 2016); Gilmore, Golden Gulag; Jan Rehmann, “Hypercarceration: A Neoliberal Response to ‘Surplus Population,’” Rethinking Marxism 27, no. 2 (2015): 303–11, https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2015.1007790.

35 “Black Unemployment Rate Is Consistently Twice that of Whites,” Pew Research Center (blog), August 21, 2013, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/08/21/through-good-times-and-bad-black-unemployment-is-consistently-double-that-of-whites/.

36 Camp, Incarcerating the Crisis, 3.

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people.”37 With cuts to public expenditure on education, transportation, health care, and

public-sector employment, the police and criminal justice system have ultimately come

to replace social welfare. Since the early 1980s, state spending on prisons has increased

three times the rate of spending on schools,38 while spending on police has increased by

445%. These policies should not be seen as inevitable reactions to criminality or threats

to public safety; in fact, crime rates have been falling for the past twenty years. Instead,

and as I argued in chapter 3, mass criminalisation functions to legitimise the neoliberal

state by containing and pacifying those that have been rendered superfluous by its

economic dislocations: predominantly, but not exclusively, poor people of colour.39 As

Davis makes clear, mass criminalisation has effectively become a catchall solution to

the systemic problem of racial capitalism, including “homelessness, unemployment,

drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy”40, as well as the existence of a growing

“surplus population”—disproportionately non-white—whose labour has been rendered

redundant by the de-industrialisation of the US political economy.41 Blacks and

Hispanics currently constitute 58% of the prison population, despite being only one

fourth of the general population.42 Native Americans, similarly, are incarcerated at

nearly twice the rate of whites. Commenting on the link between mass criminalisation

of non-white life and the neoliberalisation of racial capitalism, Loïc Wacquant observes

that “fewer than half of the inmates [in U.S. prisons] held a full-time job at the time of

their arraignment and two-thirds issue from households with an annual income

amounting to less than half of the so-called poverty line.”43

In light of this, to suggest that BLM is a struggle for recognition only (as argued

37 Quoted in Mark Jay, “Policing the Poor in Detroit,” Monthly Review (blog), January 1, 2017, https://monthlyreview.org/2017/01/01/policing-the-poor-in-detroit/.

38 “State and Local Expenditures on Corrections and Education” (U.S. Department of Education, July 2016), https://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/other/expenditures-corrections-education/brief.pdf.

39 This analysis was first developed by Stuart Hall and his co-authors in Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (Macmillan International Higher Education, 2013). For contemporary takes on Hall's thesis, see Gilmore, Golden Gulag; Bernard E. Harcourt, The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011); Jonathan. Simon, Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear, Studies in Crime and Public Policy (Oxford ; New York, New York ; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), https://www.dawsonera.com/guard/protected/dawson.jsp?name=https://lse.ac.uk/idp&dest=http://www.dawsonera.com/depp/reader/protected/external/AbstractView/S9780198040026; Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Duke University Press, 2009).

40 Angela Davis, “Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex,” n.d., http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/davisprison.html.

41 See Gilmore, Golden Gulag and Rehmann, “Hypercarceration.”42 “NAACP | Criminal Justice Fact Sheet,” NAACP, accessed June 24, 2017,

http://www.naacp.org/criminal-justice-fact-sheet/.43 Glenn C. Loury et al., Race, Incarceration, and American Values (MIT Press, 2008), 60.

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by Lilla and Harvey) is to miss the mark. The contemporary policing of racialized

minorities is intimately linked to neoliberalism's production of racialized categories of

surplus people, and as such there can be no real racial justice without economic justice

—and vice versa. In Barbara Fields' insightful formulation,

“There's no sense in which the BLM movement should be seen as identity politics. It is a movement of a great portion of the poorest people in the United States resisting the violence of the capitalist state. Black Lives Matter... is as much an example of a U.S.-based class struggle as Occupy Wall Street was. To focus on the black poor is not to ignore others who also endure economic inequality. In speech after speech, the leading voices of this movement have insisted that if we liberate the black poor, or if the black poor liberate themselves, we will uplift everybody else who's been kept down. In other words, any serious analysis of racial capitalism must recognize that to seek liberation for black people is also to destabilize inequality in the United States at large, and to create new possibilities for all who live here.”44

In what ways is this an international struggle? As Chris Chen perceptibly notes,

the same security state that sends 1 in 3 black men to prison in their lifetime also

“deports nearly half a million undocumented immigrants annually, has exterminated

anywhere from 100,000 to over a million civilians in Iraq alone, and is now gearing up

for a $46 billion dollar 'border surge' which includes drone surveillance and biometric

exit scanning.”45 In what follows I argue that racialized state violence against minorities

is intimately connected to imperial overseas missions (particularly in the Muslim world)

and neocolonial exploitation of the global South: as BLM organisers and activists have

repeatedly emphasised, police terror within the US is closely linked to the violence

inflicted on Brown and Black people globally. To be clear, the issue here is not that

racism elsewhere mimics that in the United States—and thus that, say, Brazil, occupied

Palestine, and South Africa are like America—but, rather, that these heterogeneous

geographies are linked through the overlapping racial logic of global capitalism. As

44 Alicia Garza similarly argues that “#BlackLivesMatter doesn’t mean your life isn’t important–it means that Black lives, which are seen as without value within White supremacy, are important to your liberation. Given the disproportionate impact state violence has on Black lives, we understand that when Black people in this country get free, the benefits will be wide reaching and transformative for society as a whole. When we are able to end hyper-criminalization and sexualization of Black people and end the poverty, control, and surveillance of Black people, every single person in this world has a better shot at getting and staying free. When Black people get free, everybody gets free.” Alicia Garza, “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement,” October 7, 2014, http://www.thefeministwire.com/2014/10/blacklivesmatter-2/.

45 Chris Chen, “The Limit Point of Capitalist Equality,” Endnotes 3, accessed May 13, 2018, https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/3/en/chris-chen-the-limit-point-of-capitalist-equality.

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BLM co-founder Alicia Garza explains, “We remain in active solidarity with all

oppressed people who are fighting for their liberation and we know that our destinies

are intertwined.”46 As we shall see, BLM organisers are enacting a revolutionary

solidarity. In that, they not only challenge the idea that Black freedom is attainable

within US legal frameworks and political institutions: they also push us to think of the

protests against police brutality in the US as a domestic instance of a broader and global

struggle against racial capitalism, imperial violence, and settler colonialism—and, thus,

as part and parcel of a radical internationalism from below.47

“No Vietnamese Ever Called Me Nigger”: The Lessons of Black Internationalism

When the streets of Ferguson erupted in protest in 2014, activists in the West

Bank and Gaza were amongst the first to respond, tweeting messages in support as well

as concrete advice on how to cope with tear gas inhalation. “Solidarity with #Ferguson.

Remember to not touch your face when teargassed or put water on it. Instead use milk

or coke!”,48 read one tweet. A solidarity statement signed by a range of Palestinian

activists and organisations similarly declared: “with a Black Power fist in the air, we

salute the people of Ferguson and join in your demands for justice.”49 In response, BLM

protesters began waving Palestinian flags, chanting “from Ferguson to Palestine,

occupation is a crime.”50 A year later over 1,100 Black activists, artists, scholars,

students, and organizations signed a statement calling for “solidarity with the Palestinian

46 Alicia Garza, “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement.47 Such a perspective stands in direct contrast to the increasingly popular body of thought known as

Afropessimism. Scholars such as Frank Wilderson and Jared Sexton strictly distinguish between worker's exploitation and the slave's “social death”, which they argue constitute the very condition of possibility for civil society. Yet, and as Barabara Fields and Robin D.G. Kelley make clear, this precludes an understanding of slavery as fundamental to capitalism, “as though the chief business of slavery were the production of white supremacy rather than the production of cotton, sugar, rice and tobacco.” Afropessimism not only frames anti-Blackness as separate from global capitalism, imperial violence, and settler colonialism, thus ruling out the possibility of solidarity. In the words of Kelley, it also “obscures the dialectic that produced and reproduced the violence of a regime dependent on black life for its profitability.” Robin D. G. Kelley, “Black Study, Black Struggle,” Boston Review, n.d., http://bostonreview.net/forum/robin-d-g-kelley-black-study-black-struggle.

48 Robert Mackey, “Advice for Ferguson’s Protesters From the Middle East,” The New York Times, August 14, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/15/world/middleeast/advice-for-fergusons-protesters-from-the-middle-east.html.

49 “Palestinians Express ‘solidarity with the People of Ferguson’ in Mike Brown Statement,” Electronic Intifada, August 15, 2014, https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/rana-baker/palestinians-express-solidarity-people-ferguson-mike-brown-statement.

50 Acronym TV, From Ferguson To Palestine Occupation Is a Crime, accessed May 29, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pR6bt9_Yn5o.

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struggle.”51 A short video, entitled “When I See Them I See Us”, was also released. 52

Featuring activists, artists, and academics such as Cornel West, Angela Davis, Danny

Glover, Lauryn Hill, Alice Walker, and Palestinian hip-hop ensemble DAM, the video

highlights the common Black-Palestinian struggle against militarised policing and other

forms of state-sponsored violence; “Gaza Stands with Baltimore”, “End state racism”,

and “Your walls will never cage our freedom”, the video declares. In May 2015, a

delegation of organisers from Black Lives Matter, BYP100, and Dream Defenders

traveled to Israel-Palestine where they met with artists, civil rights activists, youth

organisers, and refugees in Ramallah, Jerusalem, and Haifa. While this pushed Black-

Palestinian solidarity into mainstream focus, such solidarities are not new. Indeed,

Palestinians and Black radicals have a long history of drawing connections between

each others struggles. As Rabab Abdulhadi points out, “[t]hese expressions are not new

and they're not because of the excitement of the moment. They do have their historical

precedents in the connections that organically brought together anti-colonial, anti-racist,

anti-capitalist—very clear revolutionary politics, not reformist politics.”53 Thinkers and

activists such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Claudia Jones, Paul Robeson,

Malcolm X, and Angela Davis have all waved the banner of internationalism with the

(Muslim) Third World. Taking the intertwined histories of colonialism and racial

capitalism as their starting point, they envisioned a global revolutionary movement and

thus sought to link their own struggle within the United States to a larger community of

resistance beyond the nation-state—from Harlem to Cairo, Palestine to Bandung, Cape

Town to Kingston. As Nikhil Singh has argued,

“perhaps the most consistent and enduring strand of modern black activism has been the opposition to imperialism and colonialism. It was manifest across the spectrum of black politics, from the secular communism of Du Bois and Paul Robeson, to the Christian pacifism of King and the revolutionary, black nationalism of Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party. It led diverse groups of the black activists and intellectuals in the United State to consciously link their own aspirations to national liberation struggles across the world, including India, Ghana, Cuba, Congo, Vietnam, South Africa, and Palestine.”54

51 “2015 Black Solidarity Statement With Palestine,” Black Solidarity With Palestine, accessed May 29, 2017, http://www.blackforpalestine.com/.

52 Black-Palestinian Solidarity, WHEN I SEE THEM I SEE US, accessed May 29, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsdpg-9cmSw.

53 Quoted in Kristian Davis Bailey, “Black–Palestinian Solidarity in the Ferguson–Gaza Era,” American Quarterly 67, no. 4 (December 21, 2015): 1017, https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2015.0060.

54 Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2005), 53–4. For a good introduction to Black internationalism, see Cheryl

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Malcolm X's writings and teachings were foundational in shaping this tradition

of Black internationalism. Rejecting Martin Luther King's civil rights framework, he

argued that the struggle against Jim Crow segregation and racial violence was part of a

global struggle against white supremacy: “The same rebellion, the same impatience, the

same anger that exists in the hearts of the dark people in Africa and Asia is existing in

the hearts and minds of 20 million black people in this country who have been just as

thoroughly colonized as the people in Africa and Asia.”55 For Malcolm, this meant that

the struggle against racial oppression in the United States had to be internationalised.

Black freedom would only come about by using what he called “new methods”, which

required getting out of “the jurisdiction of Uncle Sam” and into the Third World.56 In

1964, he traveled to the Middle East and Africa, where he visited a string of countries

and met with intellectuals and political figures such as Gamal Abdel Nasser, Maya

Angelou, Julius Nyerere, Jomo Kenyatta, and the head of the newly formed Palestine

Liberation Organization. After returning to the United States, he began to explicitly link

European colonial rule to institutionalised racism in the US; the police in Harlem, he

argued, are like the French in Algeria, “like an occupying army.”57 As a former Pullman

porter and final assembler at the Ford Wayne Assembly Plant, he clearly understood that

these dynamics were fundamentally intertwined with capitalism: as George Breitman

documents, “from the thinking initiated through his discussions with African

revolutionaries... he [Malcolm X] came to the conclusion that capitalism is the cause of

racism, that you can't have capitalism without racism.”58 For Malcolm, the Black

Higashida, Black Internationalist Feminism: Women Writers of the Black Left, 1945-1995 (University of Illinois Press, 2011); Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Beacon Press, 2003); Sean L. Malloy, Out of Oakland: Black Panther Party Internationalism During the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2017); Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939 (Univ of North Carolina Press, 2011); M. Marable and Vanessa Agard-Jones, Transnational Blackness: Navigating the Global Color Line (Springer, 2008); Erik S. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Duke University Press, 2011); Vijay Prashad, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (Beacon Press, 2002); Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Harvard University Press, 2017); Michael O. West, William G. Martin, and Fanon Che Wilkins, From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International since the Age of Revolution (Univ of North Carolina Press, 2009).

55 Quoted on the cover of Sohail Daulatzai, Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom Beyond America (U of Minnesota Press, 2012).

56 Sohail Daulatzai, Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom Beyond America (U of Minnesota Press, 2012).

57 Quoted in Franziska Meister, Racism and Resistance: How the Black Panthers Challenged White Supremacy (transcript Verlag, 2017), 194.

58 Quoted in Malcolm X: From Political Eschatology to Religious Revolutionary (BRILL, 2016), 80.

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struggle within the United States thus had to be understood in the context of an

international struggle against racial capitalism and imperialism:

“I, for one, would like to impress, especially upon those who call themselves leaders, the importance of realizing the direct connection between the struggle of the Afro-American in this country and the struggle of our people all over the world. As long as we think—as one of my good brothers mentioned out of the side of his mouth here a couple of Sundays ago—that we should get Mississippi straightened out before we worry about the Congo, you’ll never get Mississippi straightened out. Not until you start realizing your connection with the Congo.”59

The Black internationalist imaginary was perhaps most forcefully articulated by

the Black Panther Party (BPP)—whose multi-racial Rainbow Coalition we already

encountered in chapter 4—which sought to forge a global revolutionary struggle

inspired by the tenets of Marxist Leninism and Maoism. Huey Newton, who co-founded

the BPP together with Bobby Searle in 1966, developed a theory of

“intercommunalism”, a political imaginary rooted in an analysis of racial capitalism and

imperialism. As Alex Lubin explains, the politics of intercommunalism “directed

revolutionary politics away from the nation-bound horizon of the mainstream civil

rights movement and toward the global sphere of anti-imperialism and

decolonization.”60 The Panthers rejected the framework of Black nationalism, which

they argued failed to identify the US as an imperial power. Black nationalism was

problematic because, rather than challenging racial capitalism and imperialism, Black

nationalists sought inclusion within the empire. As Newton maintained, “[w]e cannot be

nationalists, when our country is not a nation, but an empire.”61 In Black Power, BPP

members Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) and Charles Hamilton theorised Black

urban communities and the ghetto within the United States as “internal colonies.” Black

subjugation within the US, they argued, effectively mirrored colonial rule: “institutional

racism has another name: colonialism.”62 Addressing the organization of Latin American

solidarity in 1967, Carmichael maintained that “[t]he struggle we are engaged in is

59 “When Malcolm X Went to Africa,” Africa Is a Country (blog), June 27, 2011, http://africasacountry.com/2011/06/malcolm-x-in-africa1/.

60 Alex Lubin, Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab Political Imaginary (UNC Press Books, 2014), 121.

61 Quoted in Charles Earl Jones, The Black Panther Party (reconsidered) (Black Classic Press, 1998), 66.

62 Stokely Carmichael, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (Vintage Books, 1967), 5.

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international... Our people are a colony within the United States... It is more than a

figure of speech to say that the black communities in America are the victims of white

imperialism and colonial exploitation.”63

In place of a nation-bound civil rights movement, the Panthers thus sought to

forge political solidarities beyond the nation-state and in the realm of international and

intercommunal politics. Envisioning a global, revolutionary, and anti-imperialist

movement, they built connections with national liberation movements around the world.

As Newton explained,

“We see very little different in what happens to a community here in North America and what happens to a community in Vietnam. We see very little difference in what happens, even culturally to a Chinese community in San Francisco and a Chinese community in Hong Kong. We see very little difference in what happens to a Black community in Harlem and a Black community in South Africa, a Black community in Angola and Mozambique.”64

The BPP's newspaper captured this internationalist outlook: it published countless

articles on the struggle for decolonisation in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and

Asia, including the Congo, Palestine, Bolivia, Cuba, and Vietnam.65 Amongst these, the

Palestinian national liberation movement was seen as a particularly important question.

As Lubin has shown, the Panthers approached the question of Palestine, not as a Jewish-

Arab conflict, but “through the optic of anti-imperialism, with a particularly sharp focus

on the role of the U.S. empire in affecting the plight of Palestinians and the actions of

Zionists.”66 The Panthers argued that “Zionism was an extension of U.S. imperialism

and racial capitalism” and, hence, “that the PLO was struggling against the same

imperial powers as black radicals in the United States.”67 Palestinians and Black

communities in the US were thus intimately linked through their struggle for survival

under the conditions of racial capitalism and imperialism. This meant that the struggle

for peace in the Middle East by necessity would entail a struggle against Israeli, US

imperialism as well as racial capitalism. More so than other issues, the question of

63 Stokely Carmichael and Michael Thelwell, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) (Simon and Schuster, 2003), 590.

64 Huey P. Newton, The Huey P. Newton Reader (Seven Stories Press, 2011), 170.65 Besenia Rodriguez, “‘Long Live Third World Uniy! Long Live Internationalism’: Huey P. Newton’s

Revolutionary Intercommunalism,” in Transnational Blackness: Navigating the Global Color Line, ed. M. Marable and Vanessa Agard-Jones (Springer, 2008), 161.

66 Lubin, Geographies of Liberation, 123.67 Lubin, 123.

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Palestine thus exposed the rift between the mainstream civil rights movement and the

anti-imperialist intercommunalism of the Panthers. Indeed, where Black nationalists

sought inclusion within the legal and political boundaries of the American polity, the

Panthers embraced a “revolutionary nationalism” that disavowed the US empire and lent

support to Third World national liberation struggles.

History has not been kind to the internationalist imaginary of the Panthers. Like

Malcolm X, the Panthers are today typically remembered as violent, militant, and

extremist—a sharp contrast to Martin Luther King Jr., who is celebrated as a saint-like

figure and national hero, his birthday being a public holiday and his “I Have a Dream”

speech covering the new five-dollar bill. Here it is worth recalling that King, in his last

years, adopted a position not radically different from Malcolm X and the Panthers. In

his “Beyond Vietnam” speech, delivered exactly one year before he was assassinated,

King linked segregation to imperialism, and described the war in Vietnam through the

lens of empire. Imperialism, poverty, and racism, he argued, are deeply interrelated and

must therefore be confronted together. The following year he helped orchestrate the

Poor People's Campaign, which addressed questions of poverty, unemployment, and

housing for the poor—regardless of racial background.68 Reflecting on the gulf between

King and Malcolm X in public memory, and the empty symbolism of King, James

Baldwin would later argue that

“The only reason you talked to Martin is because you were afraid to talk to Malcolm. That's the only reason you talked to Martin. And then when both men (and this happened before your eyes), when both men arrived at the same point—that is to say when they connected—then the great black disaster: the global disaster. At the point where Malcolm came back from Mecca and said, 'White is a state of mind; white people are not devils. You are only as white as you want to be' and when Martin connected the plight of garbage men in Memphis with Korea and Vietnam, then both men were killed.”69

In sum, Black radicals have a long history of connecting Third World liberation

struggles to their own struggle for freedom. In Lubin's terminology, Black

internationalists such as Malcolm X and Huey Newton envisioned “an abolitionist

68 In fact, and as Nikhil Pal Singh has argued, the scope and aspirations of the civil rights movement cannot be captured by recognition politics: the hegemonic narrative of civil rights “fails to recognize the historical depth and heterogeneity of black struggles against racism, narrowing the political scope of black agency and reinforcing a formal, legalistic view of black equality.” Singh, Black Is a Country, 31.

69 James Baldwin, Conversations with James Baldwin (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1989), 218.

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geography”70 based on shared struggles against state violence, racial capitalism, and

colonialism. Connections of oppression produced connections of struggle, as “the

tearful waters of the Mississippi River flow[ed] into the sorrowful waters of the River

Jordan.”71 In the next section I build on this analysis to show that recent forms of Black-

Palestinian solidarity can and should be understood as a continuation of this tradition of

Afro-Arab internationalism. Focusing on how neoliberal counterinsurgency methods

and tactics increasingly have come to flow from Gaza to Ferguson to the battlefields of

Iraq and Afghanistan—and back again—I demonstrate that the domestic policing of

Black lives in the United States is intimately linked to the state terror imposed on Brown

and Black people globally. The issue here is not whether places like urban Black

America and occupied Palestine are alike—although they may be, as many have insisted

—but, rather, and as we shall see, that these heterogeneous geographies are linked

through the logic of racial capitalism, as manifest in the wars on drugs, crime, and

terror.

The (Post)Colonial Boomerang: Race and the Global Security Archipelago

When protests erupted in Ferguson in 2014 many were shocked by the heavily

militarised response by the police. The “war has come home”, declared a number of

leading media outlets.72 As Robin D.G. Kelley explains, “Ferguson looked like a war

zone because the police looked like the military.”73 Dressed in riot gear, and armed with

tear gas, stun grenades, and rubber bullets, the. St Louis law enforcement could have

been mistaken for soldiers. Ferguson is not unique in this regard. In recent years

American police departments have substantially increased their use of war zone

equipment and tactics, acquiring everything from body armour, drones, SWAT vehicles,

70 Lubin, Geographies of Liberation, 24.71 Vijay Prashad, “Alex Lubin. Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab Political

Imaginary.,” The American Historical Review 120, no. 4 (October 1, 2015): 1448, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/120.4.1448.

72 “War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Police” (American Civil Liberties Union, 2014); “The US War Culture Has Come Home to Roost,” www.counterpunch.org, August 20, 2014, http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/08/20/the-us-war-culture-has-come-home-to-roost/; “American Military Technology Has Come Home—to Your Local Police Force,” The Nation, accessed May 30, 2017, https://www.thenation.com/article/american-military-technology-has-come-home-to-your-local-police-force/; Jana Hönke and Markus-Michael Müller, The Global Making of Policing: Postcolonial Perspectives (Routledge, 2016).

73 Robin D. G. Kelley, “Thug Nation: On State Violence and Disposability,” in Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter, ed. Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton (Verso Books, 2016), 27.

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toxic chemicals, military aircrafts, and machine guns.74 Behind this stands a Department

of Defence programme, which enables the transfer of excess military property to US

law enforcement agencies. Since the programme was created in 1997, more than $4.3

billion worth of gear has been imported from the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan to

the streets of places like Ferguson.75

Such transfers between military and police are not unique, nor are they novel:

colonial military tactics have historically helped shape policing methods in the colonial

metropolis. The contemporary policing of Black and other working class communities

builds on explicitly colonial models of pacification, militarisation, and control. Colonial

war-zones frequently functioned as “social laboratories” where new techniques of

control could be tested before they were shipped back to the metropole:76 the French

Empire regularly used Algeria as testing ground for forms of population control that

later were exported back to the colonial metropolis; the United States relied on the

Philippines to experiment with new forms of policing tactics; and Britain made use of

its domestic colony, Ireland, and later Palestine, Malaya, and Kenya.77 Following the

Second World War and the rising presence of Black and Asian communities in the

imperial metropoles, alongside the Great Migration of Black Americans into Northern

cities, these imperial policing techniques increasingly found their way back to the

capitalist heartlands in the North—a “boomerang effect”, in Aimé Césaire's memorable

formulation. As Foucault later would elaborate:

“while colonization, with its techniques and its political and juridical weapons, obviously transported European models to other continents, it also had a considerable boomerang effect on the mechanisms of power in the West, and on the apparatuses, institutions, and techniques of power. A

74 Mark Thompson, “War Comes Home: The Militarization of U.S. Police Forces,” Time, accessed May 30, 2017, http://time.com/3144818/ferguson-police-militarization-pictures/.

75 “Ferguson Police: A Stark Illustration of Newly Militarised US Law Enforcement,” The Guardian, accessed May 29, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/14/ferguson-police-military-restraints-violence-weaponry-missouri.

76 For example, see Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (University of California Press, 1997); Julian Go and Anne L. Foster, The American Colonial State in the Philippines: Global Perspectives (Duke University Press, 2003); Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Harvard University Press, 2005); Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt: With a New Preface (University of California Press, 1991).

77 See, indicatively, Lubin, Geographies of Liberation, 154; Dr Georgina Sinclair and Dr Chris A. Williams, “‘Home and Away’: The Cross-Fertilisation between ‘Colonial’ and ‘British’ Policing, 1921–85,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 35, no. 2 (June 1, 2007): 221–38, https://doi.org/10.1080/03086530701337567; Paul Dixon, “‘Hearts and Minds’? British Counter-Insurgency from Malaya to Iraq,” Journal of Strategic Studies 32, no. 3 (June 1, 2009): 353–81, https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390902928172; Vitale, The End of Policing; Stephen Graham, Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (Verso Books, 2011).

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whole series of colonial models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practise something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself.”78

Palestine has historically been a node where new methods of policing,

population pacification, and counterinsurgency have been developed. Laleh Khalili

documents how, during the Mandate period, Palestine served as a laboratory in which

British counterinsurgency practices—including forms of collective punishment, siege of

cities and villages, the building of walls, and the usage of civilians as hostages and

human shields—were perfected and then exported elsewhere to places such as Malaya,

Cyprus, and Kenya.79 These practices were subsequently absorbed, and innovated upon,

by the Israeli security apparatus which has continued to use Palestine as the testing

ground for a range of counterinsurgency methods and tactics. As Kahlili explains,

“having consolidated its technologies of domination through several decades of military

occupation, the Israeli military has now become a significant exporter of the

counterinsurgency knowledge it has accumulated in Palestine.”80 Israeli companies have

emerged at the forefront of a multi-billion-dollar global industry for security technology,

including unmanned drones, biometric scanners, and surveillance equipment.81 Israeli

drones designed to target Palestinians are now routinely deployed by police forces in

North America, Europe and East Asia; similarly, Israeli experience in closure,

entrapment, and containment—of locking down cities and incarcerating the entire

population of Gaza and the West Bank—is increasingly being made use of by those

planning large-scale security operations in the West.82

One of Israel's largest clients is the United States, which in return offers Israel

military and political aid. Since 9/11 almost all police department in the United States

have sent high-level commanders to Israel to receive lessons in counterterrorism,

78 Quoted in Joseph Pugliese, Biometrics: Bodies, Technologies, Biopolitics (Routledge, 2012), 52.79 Laleh Khalili, “THE LOCATION OF PALESTINE IN GLOBAL COUNTERINSURGENCIES,”

International Journal of Middle East Studies 42, no. 3 (August 2010): 415, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743810000425.

80 Khalili, 416. As she explains, “The violence of Israeli counterinsurgency against Palestinians cannot be understood without locating it in a broader global space, where imperial control through military intervention continues apace, and in a more historical context, where the violent technologies of domination travel across time and space, making Palestine an archetypal laboratory and a crucial node.”

81 Andy Clarno, Neoliberal Apartheid: Palestine/Israel and South Africa after 1994 (University of Chicago Press, 2017), 165.

82 See Graham, Cities Under Siege, xviii. The new high- tech border fence between the United States and Mexico, for example, is being built by a consortium linking Boeing to the Israeli company Elbit, whose radar and targeting technologies have been developed in the permanent lockdown of Palestinian urban life; Graham, xxii–xxii.

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guerilla warfare, and occupation enforcement.83 These connections are so important that

the NYPD recently opened a local branch in Israel. In light of this it is not surprising

that the police violence in Ferguson and the attendant images inspired comparisons with

Israel’s occupation of Gaza: in fact, out of the four law enforcement agencies that were

deployed in Ferguson, at least two had received training in Israel.84 When Palestinian

activists tweeted advice to protesters in Ferguson—including how to cope with tear gas

inhalation and other riot control methods—they offered solidarity for a struggle which

not only is parallel to their own, but also deeply interconnected. “Dear #Ferguson”,

tweeted one Palestinian activist, “The Tear Gas used against you was probably tested on

us first by Israel. No worries, Stay Strong. Love, #Palestine.”85

The flow of weapons and tactics between colony and metropole, and military

and police, has never been a one-way street. From the Philippines to Guatemala to Iraq

and Afghanistan, the history of policing blurs the edges between the domestic and the

international. In the same way that tactics and technologies from overseas imperial

engagements often have been shipped home and incorporated into domestic American

policing, policing methods imposed on Black communities in the United States—

including surveillance, racial profiling, and pre-emptive policing—have frequently

served as models for counterterrorism tactics and operations abroad.86 Indeed, just as

colonial technologies and techniques are “coming home” to organise, police, and pacify

domestic racialized populations, “so efforts to classify risky versus risk- free

populations, activities, and circulations are 'moving out' to colonize the infrastructures,

systems and circulations which sustain transnational capitalism.”87 Counterinsurgency-

inspired policing emerged in the 1960s as a response to the increasing number of race

riots in American cities. As William Rosenau explains, “policy elites saw the ghetto and

its denizens as the cockpit of nascent revolution—a fear reinforced by Black Power

advocates and other radicals who called for insurrection against white oppressors.”88 In

83 “OPINION: Ferguson Is Not Gaza … yet,” accessed November 26, 2016, http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/8/ferguson-police-violenceisraeliandusmilitarizedpolicies.html.

84 Mark LeVine, “Ferguson Is Not Gaza … yet,” Aljazeera, August 18, 2014, http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/8/ferguson-police-violenceisraeliandusmilitarizedpolicies.html.

85 Rajai Abukhalil, “Dear #Ferguson. The Tear Gas Used against You Was Probably Tested on Us First by Israel. No Worries, Stay Strong. Love, #Palestine,” microblog, @rajaiabukhalil (blog), accessed May 30, 2017, https://twitter.com/rajaiabukhalil/status/499758494749577217.

86 Kristian Williams, “The Other Side of the COIN: Counterinsurgency and Community Policing,” Interface: A Journal for and about Social Movements 3, no. 1 (2011). See also “Policing Empire | Jacobin,” accessed November 26, 2016, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/09/policing-empire/.

87 Graham, Cities Under Siege, 131.88 William Rosenau, “‘Our Ghettos, Too, Need a Lansdale’: American Counter-Insurgency Abroad and at

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an article in US News & World Report, Army Colonel Robert B. Rigg warned that

America's urban ghettos could pose a greater danger than enemies abroad: “There is the

danger and the promise that urban guerrillas of the future can be organized to such a

degree that their defeat would require the direct application of military power.”89 The

country, he suggested, was effectively on the verge of a civil war. After the 5-day riot in

the Watts neighbourhood in Los Angeles in 1965—in which 34 people were killed, 1000

injured, and 4000 arrested—government officials and police strategists began to study

counter-guerilla warfare and counterinsurgency techniques to quell ghetto unrest.90

Darryl Gates, who was field commander in Watts in 1965 and later would serve as Chief

of the Los Angeles police during the 1991 riots, explains that

“[We] began reading everything we could get our hands on concerning guerilla warfare. We watched with interest what was happening in Vietnam. We looked at military training, and in particular we studied what group of marines, based at the Naval Armory in Chavez Ravine, were doing. They shared with us their knowledge of counter-insurgency and guerrilla warfare.”91

In the late 1960s, ideas, equipment, and tactics used in Vietnam increasingly

made their way back into domestic US police departments. On 8 December 1960, the

first SWAT squad made its operational debut in an attack on the Los Angeles

headquarters of the Black Panther Party. In the decades that followed, the military

largely neglected counterinsurgency while the police as, Kristian Williams has shown,

“kept practicing, and developing, its techniques.”92 The war on drugs, launched in 1971

by Richard Nixon; the expansion of the prison industrial complex under the Reagan era;

and the militarisation of the US southern border, all provided new impetus to militarised

policing. Black communities such as Skid Row, a high-poverty area of Los Angeles,

have frequently served as testing ground for counterterrorism and counterinsurgency

policies that then have been exported around the world. In fact, and as Williams shows,

many of the contemporary counterinsurgency methods used in Iraq and Afghanistan

were “developed by police agencies inside the US.”93

Home in the Vietnam Era,” in The New Counter-Insurgency Era in Critical Perspective, ed. Celeste Ward Gventer and M. L. R. Smith (Springer, 2014), 112.

89 U.S. News & World Report (U.S. News Publishing Corporation, 1968).90 Williams, “The Other Side of the COIN: Counterinsurgency and Community Policing,” 91.91 Rosenau, “‘Our Ghettos, Too, Need a Lansdale’: American Counter-Insurgency Abroad and at Home

in the Vietnam Era,” 117.92 Williams, “The Other Side of the COIN: Counterinsurgency and Community Policing,” 92.93 Williams, 81.

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The broken window theory of policing has been particularly influential in

shaping new methods of counterinsurgency. Introduced by James Q. Wilson and George

L. Kelling in an article in The Atlantic in 1982, it argues that disorder in the form of

minor violations breeds larger disorders. As Christina Heatherton and Jordan Camp

explain, the idea “is deceptively simple: to stop major crimes from occurring, police

must first prevent small signs of 'disorder' from proliferating, such as graffiti, litter,

panhandling, public urination, the sale of untaxed cigarettes, and so forth.”94 According

to this logic, if minor crimes are left unchecked this will act as a signal to others in the

community that more serious crimes can be committed without impunity. Before his

final and fatal encounter with the police, Philando Castile was stopped 31 times and

charged with more than 60 minor violations95; Eric Garner was similarly stopped and

harassed for small-scale infractions for several years before he was slain on a Staten

Island pavement. While it is his last words—“I can't breathe”—that have become a

rallying cry for protestors, his preceding words, spoken in an attempt to reason with the

police officers before they crushed his head to the pavement, are perhaps more telling:

“Every time you see me, you want to mess with me. I’m tired of it.”96 These examples

demonstrate the ways in which broken windows policing has been crucial in

legitimating pre-emptive measures such as racial profiling and more aggressive policing

in inner-city communities. As Kelley explains, just like “lethal drone attacks on young

men who might be terrorists or may one day commit acts of terrorism—the presumption

of guilt based on racial profiling is a essential component of broken windows

policing.”97 Broken windows techniques that have been picked up by the military

includes the Neighborhood Watch, computerized intelligence files, and statistical

analysis.98 “Snake Eater”, a computer networked developed for the Chicago police, is

currently being used by the US Marines in Anbar province to identify and track

insurgents. As Williams notes, “the military has been preparing for this sort of operation

for a long time: 1999's 'Urban Warrior' training exercises included the biometric

94 Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton, “Introduction: Policing the Planet,” in Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter, ed. Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton (Verso Books, 2016), 3.

95 Michelle Alexander, “Michelle Alexander: Amidst Police Brutality, ‘There’s an Unfinished Revolution Waiting to Be Won’,” In These Times, July 12, 2016, http://inthesetimes.com/article/19286/following-horrific-violence-something-more-is-required-of-us.

96 “Eric Garner’s Haunting Last Words - CNN.com,” CNN, accessed June 22, 2017, http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/04/us/garner-last-words/index.html.

97 Kelley, “Thug Nation: On State Violence and Disposability,” 17.98 Williams, “The Other Side of the COIN: Counterinsurgency and Community Policing,” 92.

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scanning of 'resistance fighters'—in Oakland, California.”99 In return, poor urban areas

within the United States have increasingly come to look like a foreign battleground in

the war on terror. As Stephen Graham explains,

“The U.S. military’s focus on operations within the domestic urban sphere is also being dramatically strengthened by the so-called War on Terror, which designates cities—whether US or foreign—and their key infrastructures as 'battlespaces.' Viewed through such a lens, the Los Angeles riots of 1992; the various attempts to securitize urban cores during major sports events or political summits; the military response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005; the challenges of 'homeland security' in US cities—all become 'low intensity' urban military operations comparable to conducting counter-insurgency warfare in an Iraqi city.”100

These synergies cannot be captured by IR's standard language of territorial borders,

inside/outside, and Westphalian sovereignty. As Black and Palestinian activists remind

us, “from Ferguson to Palestine, occupation is a crime.” This geography contrasts with

IR's hegemonic language, which typically depicts colonial frontiers and Western

“homelands” as fundamentally separate domains. And yet, from the Black American

ghetto to the French banlieues to Brazil's favelas, security and military doctrines in the

cities of the West are melding with those used in colonial borderlands. What Graham

calls the “new military urbanism” increasingly structures the global city and the

neoliberal state worldwide; as seen in the rapid expansion of policing and incarceration,

border walls and detention centres, gated communities and fortress suburbs; in the

proliferation of militarised borders alongside the world's North-South equator; and in

the growing “security archipelago”101 designed to protect the wealthy and powerful from

those rendered surplus by the economic dislocations of racial capitalism.102 As discussed

in chapter 5, the policing, entrapment, and containment of migrants in the

Mediterranean and the forceful protection of “fortress Europe” must be considered a

similar response to the neoliberalisation of racial capitalism and its violent surplussing

99 Williams, 93.100 Graham, Cities Under Siege, 20.101 Paul Amar, The Security Archipelago: Human-Security States, Sexuality Politics, and the End of

Neoliberalism (Duke University Press, 2013).102 As Ruth Wilson Gilmore explains “the movement of capital, in other words, both precedes and

confirms structural adjustments, but the latter must be guaranteed, as it were, by some combination of coercion and consent. The rise in security work, therefore, is the natural outcome of the renovation and deepening of uneven development throughout the world.” Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “What Is to Be Done?,” American Quarterly 63, no. 2 (June 16, 2011): 251–2, https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2011.0020. See also Wacquant Loïc, “The Militarization of Urban Marginality: Lessons from the Brazilian Metropolis,” International Political Sociology 2, no. 1 (March 6, 2008): 56, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-5687.2008.00037.x.

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of racialized populations across the planet. As Ben Hayes and Roche Tasse explain,

“The EU is now 'defended' from those fleeing poverty and destruction by a formidable apparatus that includes landmines placed along the Greek Turkish border, gun boats and military aircraft patrolling the Mediterranean and the coast of West Africa, and trigger-happy border guards and barbed wire fences around the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in Morocco. Added to this, unmanned drones are now being deployed through a consortium led by Dassault Aviation, Europe's largest manufacturer of combat aircraft, to target the bodies of 'illegal immigrants.'”

In the same way that activists within Europe (such as PIR and BLM UK) have been

linking migrant border deaths to their own struggle against racialized state violence, so

Black and Palestinian activists have been recognising the intimate linkages between

Israeli apartheid and American white supremacy. In the next section I build on this to

consider how Black-Palestinian activists are enacting a revolutionary solidarity and

“many-headed hydra” from below. As we shall see, the issue here is not that Palestine is

like urban Black America—although this, to varying degrees, might be true—but more

fundamentally, that the struggle for Palestinian liberation is deeply entwined and

interconnected with the fight for Black lives in America.

From Ferguson to Palestine: Entangled Geographies of Resistance

“The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it's fucked up for you, in the same way that we've already recognized that it's fucked up for us.”

—Fred Moten103

In December 2017, 16-year-old Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi was arrested

for slapping two Israeli soldiers. Earlier that day her 14-year-old cousin had been shot in

the head by an Israeli solider while protesting against Trump's decision to recognise

Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. When Israeli soldiers tried to enter the yard of her

family home, Tamimi asked them to leave. The soldiers refused, insisting that they

wanted to use her home as a base from which to shoot at protesters. Tamimi stood her

ground. Video footage, which quickly went viral, shows her slapping and kicking the

two soldiers. Although she posed no direct threat to any of them—the soldiers wore

103 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013), 10.

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protective gear and easily fended her off—she was arrested and later sentenced to eight

months in prison.

Tamimi's case is by no means unique: since 1967, Israel has imprisoned

approximately 800,000 Palestinians.104 Palestinians currently face one of the highest per

capita incarceration rates in the world, with 40% of all Palestinian men having been

imprisoned at one point in their lives. Similar to Black lives in America, the

hyperincarceration of Palestinians must, at least in part, be seen as a consequence of

neoliberal restructuring, and the violent production of surplus populations that are

permanently unemployed and abandoned by the neoliberal state.105 As Lubin makes

clear, “[t]hroughout the 1990s and 2000s, Palestinians and African Americans were

both, in different ways, rendered as surplus populations beyond economic inclusion and

therefore were viewed as potential threats—insurgencies—that had to be contained via

counterinsurgency measures characterized by heightened security and military

techniques as well as mass incarceration.”106 To recognise these intimate links between

counterinsurgency efforts in Palestine and urban Black America is ultimately to open up

space for new forms of solidarity between these geographically dispersed struggles. As

Dream Defenders, the US civil rights organisation, declared in their solidarity statement

released in response to Tamimi's arrest:

“While our struggles may be unique, the parallels cannot be ignored. US police, ICE, border patrol and FBI train with Israeli soldiers, police, and border agents, utilizing similar repressive profiling tactics to target and harass our communities. Too many of our children quickly learn that they may be imprisoned or killed simply for who they are. From Trayvon Martin to Mohammed Abu Khdeir and Khalif Browder to Ahed Tamimi—racism, state violence and mass incarceration have robbed our people of their childhoods and their futures.”107

Like BYP100 and BLM, Dream Defenders has continued to insist that the

struggle against police brutality in the United States is more than a domestic

integrationist project. The issue here is not only that policing practices at home mimic

counterinsurgency abroad but, more fundamentally, that domestic police terror within

the US is intimately connected to the state terror imposed on Brown and Black people

104 IMEU, “Israel’s Mass Incarceration of Palestinians | IMEU,” accessed June 19, 2017, https://imeu.org/article/israels-mass-incarceration-of-palestinians.

105 I discuss the neoliberal restructuring of Israel-Palestine in further depth in chapter 7.106 Lubin, Geographies of Liberation, 152.107 “Dream Defenders & Allies Stand with Ahed Tamimi and the Palestinian Freedom Struggle,” n.d.,

https://www.dreamdefenders.org/freeahed.

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globally. Black and Palestinian struggles are fundamentally connected, not because the

experience of racial oppression is everywhere the same, but because these systems of

oppression are intimately entwined. As Angela David notes, private security groups such

as G4s (the world's largest security provider)

“already recognize what feminists call intersectionality. G4S spans from private policing to the transportation of immigrants to private prisons to the deportation of people from Mexico in the U.S. to the Mexican border, the deportation of Africans from Europe to countries in Africa... [I]t has [also] played a major role in upholding the occupation in Palestine... [T]here’s a lesson to us that the feminist notion of intersectionality is one that should be incorporated into our work as well... [I]f one looks at that corporation, I think that all of the issues that we are addressing can be seen. In a sense, the private corporations recognize the intersectionality of issues and struggles, and we have to do that, as well.”108

Black-Palestinian activists have been at the forefront in recognising these linkages.

Videos such as “When I See Them I See Us” not only point to the similarities between

police violence in the United States and Palestine, but also reveal the ways in which the

experience of Black Americans and Palestinians are fundamentally interlinked. The key

issue here is not that Palestinians and Black Americans have the same relationship to

state violence but, rather, that their different experiences of oppression must be viewed

within a shared circuit. As Mychal Denzel Smith notes, “the people of Ferguson aren't

being treated like a foreign army. They’re being treated like black people in America.”109

The producers of the “When I See Them I See Us” video were careful to recognise these

differences, emphasising that anti-Black racism in the United States is not the same as

military occupation in Palestine: while Black Americans have some recourse to civil

society, Palestinians remain stateless. “Our struggles”, the producers explained, “are not

the same and... solidarity between us is not a given.” Instead, “solidarity is a political

choice we make.”110 The solidarity envisioned here is not one of sameness or shared

identity, but a political relation forged through contestation and across boundaries of

difference: a revolutionary solidarity built on shared struggles against interlocking forms

of oppression, and brought into being by transnational resistance against the

108 “Angela Davis Talks Black Liberation, History and the Contemporary Vision,” accessed June 21, 2017, http://www.ebony.com/news-views/angela-davis-black-liberation-interview#axzz4kd97Q1lY.

109 “The Ferguson/Palestine Connection,” Ebony, accessed May 30, 2017, http://www.ebony.com/news-views/the-fergusonpalestine-connection-403#axzz4iS9jMQzR.

110 “From Ferguson to Palestine: The Resurgence of Black-Palestinian Solidarity,” Palestine in America (blog), December 10, 2016, https://palestineinamerica.com/2016/12/black-palestinian-solidarity-pia-print-issue/.

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militarisation and neoliberal governance of urban Black America and Palestinian

communities. Palestine and Black America are intimately connected, not because these

locations are the same but because the struggles taking place there reveal “something

important and productive about the colonial world.”111 Underneath the different

experiences of Black Americans and Palestinians “lies a more profound layer of

similarity that is constituted by colonial modernity and border thinking.”112 As Ruth

Wilson Gilmore notes,

“The poorer places, or global South, are also here in the global North, in both urban and rural areas 'unfixed' by capital flight and state restructuring. The unfixing is not, however, an absolute erasure; what's left behind is not just industrial residue—devalued labour, land made toxic, shuttered retail businesses, the neighbourhood or small city urban farm—but, by extension, entire ways of life that, having been made surplus, unfix people: women, men, 'the kids.'”113

June Jordan's poetry gives voice to this revolutionary solidarity and

internationalist imaginary. Inspired by the Afro-Arab solidarity movements that emerged

in the wake of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers, Jordan visited Palestinian refugee

camps in Lebanon in 1982 and 1996, when she returned to witness sixteen days of

Israeli bombardment in Operation Grapes of Wrath. Through poems such as “To Sing a

Song of Palestine” and “Apology to the People of Lebanon”, she produced a political

consciousness that brought urban Black America and occupied Palestine into contact,

revealing the international dimension of local struggles. After the 1982 Lebanon war she

wrote “Moving Towards Home”, an elegy to the horrors and “unspeakable events” she

witnessed in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla. A call for an anti-imperial,

revolutionary, and internationalist solidarity, the poem ends with the now famous lines:

“I was born a Black woman and now I am become a Palestinian against the relentless laughter of evil there is less and less living room and where are my loved ones?

111 Prashad, “Alex Lubin. Geographies of Liberation,” 8.112 Alex Lubin, “‘Fear of an Arab Planet’: The Sounds and Rhythms of Afro-Arab Internationalism,”

Journal of Transnational American Studies 5, no. 1 (2013): 261.113 Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 179.

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It is time to make our way home.”114

Conclusion

In 2005 Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast and the city of New Orleans. What

appeared to be a natural catastrophe soon exposed an underlying social crisis, as images

revealed thousands of poor people—mostly Blacks, but also Latinos, elderly, and a few

white people—stranded on rooftops without any food and water, or places to wash and

urinate. As Henry Giroux observes, “[d]ead people, mostly poor African-Americans, left

uncollected in the streets, on porches, hospitals, nursing homes, in electric wheelchairs,

and in collapsed houses prompted some people to claim that America had become like a

'Third World country' while others argued that New Orleans resembled a 'Third World

Refugee Camp.'”115 New Orleans, it turned out, was devastated not so much by bad

weather as by decades of neglect and neoliberal governance that had removed all safety

nets for the poor, sick, elderly, and homeless. In the days after Katrina, the army fought

to take back control of New Orleans, which quickly had turned into a no man's land.

“It's like Baghdad on a bad day”,116 remarked one of the officers. In her poem “Of

Refuge and Language”, Arab American poet Suheir Hammad reflects on the militarised

response to Katrina, as well as the neoliberal policies that rendered so many poor people

disposable:

“Evacuated as if criminalRescued by neighborsShot by soldiers

Adamant they belong

The rest of the world can now seeWhat I have seen

Do not look away

The rest of the world lives here tooIn America”117

114 Jordan, Directed by Desire, 400.115 Henry A. Giroux, Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability (Routledge, 2015), 8.116 Ann Scott Tyson, “Troops Back From Iraq Find Another War Zone,” September 6, 2005,

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/05/AR2005090501404.html.117 Suheir Hammad, “On Refuge and Language,” Affilia 21, no. 2 (May 1, 2006): 240–43,

https://doi.org/10.1177/0886109905285761.

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Through her poetry, Hammad invites us to connect the Black American poor and

Palestinian refugees and, thus, to think of New Orleans as a Third World refugee site.

Like Hammad's poetry, this chapter has sought to bring the precarity of urban Black

America and occupied Palestine into a shared horizon. The policing of Black lives and

other racialized minorities within the United States is intimately linked to racial

capitalism and imperialism on a global scale. The issue here is not only that policing

practices at home mimic counterinsurgency abroad but, more fundamentally, that

domestic police terror within the US is intimately connected to state terror imposed on

Brown and Black people globally—which M.I.A. recognised when she called for a focus

on the intersectionality of Black and Muslim freedom struggles. Black American and

Palestinian struggles are fundamentally connected, not because the experience of racial

oppression is everywhere the same, but because these forms of racialized state violence

are intertwined responses to the neoliberalisation of racial capitalism and its violent

surplussing of racialized populations across the planet. Commenting on the backlash

against the #MuslimLivesMatter hashtag, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor thus rightly notes

that “[i]t is one thing to respect the organizing that has gone into the movement against

police violence and brutality, but quite another to conceive of Black oppression and

anti-Black racism as so wholly unique that they are beyond the realm of understanding

and, potentially, solidarity from others who are oppressed.”118 While the

intersectionality of Black and Muslim struggles has long been recognised by radicals, it

is also being brought to life again by a new generation of Black and Palestinian

activists. By comparing their everyday realities of racialized state violence, these

activists are enacting a shared political imaginary that reveals the links between the

violence of neoliberal globalisation and the global war on terror. In doing so, they

envision a revolutionary solidarity which, as Rabab Abdulhadi has argued, contests the

“exceptionality and identity politics that oftentimes suggest that racism only affects

Blacks who should fight against it; only Palestinians are affected by Zionism and should

therefore struggle against it or only Indigenous people are impacted by US settler

colonialism and must dismantle it.”119 Brought to life by contemporary Black and

Palestinian activists, as well as by June Jordan through her poetry, Malcolm X and the

Black Panthers through their politics of intercommunalism, such a revolutionary

118 Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, 187.119 “Roundtable on Anti-Blackness and Black-Palestinian Solidarity,” accessed May 30, 2017,

http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/21764/roundtable-on-anti-blackness-and-black-palestinian.

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solidarity unravels the intimate connections between domestic anti-racism and global

anti-imperialist struggles. As Black-Palestinian activists have continued to emphasise,

such an internationalist view of liberation is urgently needed—especially in an era

“when neoliberal economic restructuring converges with global counterinsurgency

measures that target Arab and Muslim populations abroad and Black people and

Muslims at home.”120 In the next chapter I continue to analyse these entangled

geographies of resistance by turning to the ongoing struggle for decolonisation in South

Africa.

120 Chen, “The Limit Point of Capitalist Equality,” 15.

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C H A P T E R 7

Things Fall Apart: Contesting Settler Colonialism, in South Africa and Beyond

“To break up the colonial world does not mean that after the frontiers have been abolished lines of communication will be set up between the two zones. The destruction

of the colonial world is no more or less than the abolition of one zone.”—Frantz Fanon1

“When we say 'Rhodes Must Fall' we mean that patriarchy must fall, that white supremacy must fall, that all systematic oppression based on any power relations of

difference must be destroyed at all costs.”—Rhodes Must Fall Statement2

Introduction

In March 2007, a UN agency released a special report suggesting that Israel has

established “an apartheid regime that oppresses and dominates the Palestinian people as

a whole.”3 Authored by Richard Falk, former UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in

the Palestinian territories, and Virginia Tilley, the report established that Israel is “guilty

of policies and practices that constitute the crime of apartheid.”4 While the description

of Israel as an apartheid state sparked a heated controversy,5 comparisons between Israel

and apartheid South Africa are not new. In the last few years a number of activists,

intellectuals, and policymakers have argued that Israel's policies towards Palestinians

are directly comparable to the South African apartheid regime.6 The Boycott,

1 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (London: Penguin, 2001), 31.2 The statement is available at http://jwtc.org.za/resources/docs/salon-volume-9/RMF_Combined.pdf 3 “Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of …,” archive.is, March 16, 2017,

http://archive.is/5OWjY.4 “UN Report: Israel Has Established an ‘Apartheid Regime,’” accessed June 22, 2017,

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/03/report-israel-established-apartheid-regime-170315054053798.html.

5 For example, see “Richard Falk: Anger at My Israel ‘Apartheid’ Report Puts Free Speech at Risk,” Middle East Eye, accessed June 25, 2017, http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/academic-freedom-criticism-israel-united-nations-and-fake-news-748512622; Adam Shaw, “Haley Demands UN Withdraw Report Branding Israel ‘apartheid’ State,” Text.Article, Fox News, March 15, 2017, http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/03/15/un-report-co-authored-by-flamethrower-richard-falk-calls-israel-apartheid-state.html; “Arabs Protest UN’s Withdrawal of Israel ‘Apartheid’ Report,” Ynetnews, accessed June 25, 2017, http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4939473,00.html.

6 See, indicatively, Jimmy Carter, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid (Simon and Schuster, 2006); Andy Clarno, Neoliberal Apartheid: Palestine/Israel and South Africa after 1994 (University of Chicago Press, 2017); Sean Jacobs and Jon Soske, eds., Apartheid Israel: The Politics of an Analogy (Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books, 2015); Ilan Pappé, Israel and South Africa: The Many Faces of Apartheid (Zed Books Ltd., 2015); Paul Di Stefano and Mostafa Henaway, “Boycotting Apartheid From South Africa to Palestine,” Peace Review 26, no. 1 (January 1, 2014): 19–27,

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Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which seeks to pressure Israel to adhere to

international law and respect basic human rights and democratic principles,7 self-

consciously styles itself on the South African anti-apartheid movement. As Omar

Barghouti, a founding member of BDS, explains, the power of comparing Israel to

South Africa is not only that it “invites sanctions—similar in nature and breadth to those

imposed on apartheid South Africa.”8 It also disrupts narratives that frame Israel-

Palestine as a Jewish-Arab ethnic conflict rather than a case of settler colonialism and,

thus, as part of a broader context of anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles.

In this chapter, I seek to push this analysis further: building on the materialist

reading of the global colour line put forward in previous chapters, I argue that there is

much to be gained from an analysis of the interconnected logics of racial capitalism in

Israel-Palestine and contemporary South Africa. Indeed, while formal apartheid has

been dismantled and South Africa now is “free”, the struggle for decolonisation

continues. Twenty years after the end of apartheid, white ownership of the South

African economy remains intact, and the living conditions of the Black underclass

continue to resemble the historical disenfranchisements of the apartheid past. This

chapter asks why that is, as well as what (if anything) it might tell us about the struggle

for Palestinian liberation. Such an analysis is crucial because if Palestine, as Angela

Davis has argued, “represents what... South Africa represented in the 1980s and up until

the end of apartheid”,9 then it is imperative to consider what South Africa represents

today and what lessons can be learned from that.

To develop these claims, the chapter puts settler colonial studies into

conversation with the literature on racial capitalism. Where settler colonialism often has

been understood as distinct from the ongoing process of capital accumulation—in

essence, as the elimination rather than exploitation of the native—I argue that

https://doi.org/10.1080/10402659.2014.876304; Ben White, Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide (London ; New York : New York: Pluto Press, 2009).

7 More precisely, the BDS movement urges that that sanctions be imposed until Israel 1) ends its illegal military occupation of Palestine 2) recognises the equal rights of Arab-Palestinian citizens living in Israel, and 3) respects and promotes the right of return for Palestinian refugees. For a more detailed description, see “What Is BDS?,” BDS Movement, April 25, 2016, https://bdsmovement.net/what-is-bds.

8 Omar Barghouti, Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights (Haymarket Books, 2011), 64.

9 “Angela Davis: ‘This Is the South Africa Moment for the Palestinian People,’” Middle East Eye, accessed June 18, 2017, http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/activist-angela-davis-compares-bds-anti-apartheid-south-africa-movement-1086168629. Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter, similarly argues that “frankly, we believe that Palestine is the new South Africa.” See “How The Black Lives Matter and Palestinian Movements Converged,” Moment Magazine - The Next 5,000 Years of Conversation Begin Here (blog), March 14, 2016, http://www.momentmag.com/22800-2/.

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dispossession is a constant and normal strategy of racial capitalism. As Glen Coulthard

has recently argued, it is crucial that we “reestablish... the colonial relation of

dispossession as a co-foundational feature of our understanding of and critical

engagement with capitalism.”10 Applying these insights to Israel-Palestine and

contemporary South Africa, I argue for the importance of a relational analysis that—

rather than merely comparing different geographies (as if they were isolated localities

that happen to resemble one another)—reveals the ways in which different spaces of

oppression and histories of struggle are entwined and interconnected. Consequently,

while the apartheid analogy and comparison with South Africa has been helpful for

reconnecting some struggles—placing Israel-Palestine in the context of a global struggle

against settler colonialism and racism—a more thorough understanding of what South

African apartheid was and continues to be would point to the need to establish a broader

global movement—a “many-headed hydra”—based on challenging the global logics of

racial capitalism. As we shall see, this would mean reconnecting the Palestinian struggle

to the struggles of other disposable communities around the world, from the streets of

Ferguson to the dark waters of the Mediterranean, from the favelas of Salvador to the

townships of Cape Town.

I develop this argument in three sections. I begin by discussing how BDS

supporters increasingly have turned to the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa.

While this analysis has been helpful for reframing Israel-Palestine as a case of settler

colonialism (rather than ethnic conflict), it has also overlooked the role of capital in

producing and sustaining apartheid. This is problematic because, as I argue in the

second section, decolonisation remains an unfinished project in South Africa. While the

transition to democracy sought to de-racialize the state, it neglected underlying

economic questions of land reform, wealth redistribution, and reparations.11 Since 1994,

South Africa has undergone an extensive process of neoliberal restructuring which has

deepened existing inequalities and led to an increasing reliance on police violence.

10 Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 14.

11 At the time of writing, some steps have been taken to initiate a program of land redistribution. After gaining power in February 2018, President Cyril Ramaphosa pledged to redistribute land without compensation; a parliamentary committee is currently examining whether such redistribution would be allowed under current laws. Most critics have written this off as an empty promise, designed to win votes in the upcoming elections—not dissimilar from similar promises made in 2014. For example, see Marianne Merten, “South Africa Has All Legislative and Policy Tools for Land Redistribution – Politics, Patronage and Governance Paralysis Have Made It Impossible so Far,” Daily Maverick, June 5, 2018, https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2018-06-05-south-africa-has-all-legislative-and-policy-tools-for-land-redistribution-politics-patronage-and-governance-paralysis-have-made-it-impossible-so-far/.

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Thus, rather than eliminating racism, the South African transition reconfigured the

relationship between race, capital, and the state.12 In contemporary South Africa, the

racial, colonial, and gendered logics of dispossession continue to be reproduced—albeit

in a reconfigured form. The third section links this back to the BDS movement by

examining how Israel-Palestine has undergone a similar process of neoliberal

restructuring post-1994. This has resulted in the production of a racialized surplus

population for which the Israeli state must deploy new forms of control: policing,

incarceration, surveillance, warehousing, border controls, and so on. In the final section

I turn to the Fallist movements to consider what can be learned from the contemporary

struggle for decolonisation in South Africa, and what possibilities for solidarity and

internationalism follow from this.

“Our South Africa Moment Has Arrived”:13 Boycotting Israel

In 2005, a coalition of Palestinian civil-society organisations, academics,

activists, intellectuals, and trade unions called on the international community “in the

spirit of international solidarity, moral consistency, and resistance to injustice and

oppression... to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against

Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era.”14 The BDS

campaign has since then grown into a powerful global solidarity movement. As Gargi

Bhattacharyya notes, “support for Palestinian human rights has become the emblematic

solidarity movement of our time.”15 Boycotts have historically been a popular anti-

colonial and anti-racist tactic; examples include the Indian boycott of British good from

1919 to the end of the British occupation in 1947, the Montgomery Bus Boycott in the

United States, and the international boycott of apartheid South Africa. Out of these, the

South African boycott—which began in the 1950s and lasted through to the early 1990s

—remains one of the world's largest and most sustained international solidarity

12 As authors such as Michael Omi and Howard Winant point out, neoliberal projects are ultimately racial projects. See Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (Routledge, 2014), 211. See also David J. Roberts and Minelle Mahtani, “Neoliberalizing Race, Racing Neoliberalism: Placing ‘Race’ in Neoliberal Discourses,” Antipode 42, no. 2 (March 1, 2010): 248–57, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2009.00747.x and Jodi Melamed, “The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism,” Social Text 24, no. 4 89 (December 21, 2006): 1–24, https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-2006-009.

13 See chapter 14, “Our South Africa Moment Has Arrived”, in Barghouti, Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions.

14 “Palestinian Civil Society Call for BDS,” BDS Movement, July 9, 2005, https://bdsmovement.net/call.15 See Gargi Bhattacharyya, “Globalizing Racism and Myths of the Other in the ‘War on Terror,’” in

Thinking Palestine, ed. Ronit Lentin (Zed Books Ltd., 2013).

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movements. Anti-apartheid movements in the UK, the Netherlands, and the United

States pressured their governments to stop trading with, and cut off oil and arms

supplies to, the apartheid regime; different Third World governments in the UN worked

to institute the UN Special Committee Against Apartheid; and campaigns in the

Commonwealth countries led to the implementation of the highly successful sports

boycott.16

Given the success of the anti-apartheid movement, it is not surprising that BDS

frequently cites the South African experience as a major source of inspiration. As

Abigail Bakan and Yasmeen Abu-Laban explain, BDS hopes to grow into “an

international movement of economic, political and social pressure from below that

would isolate Israel as a 'pariah state' comparable to apartheid South Africa.”17 South

Africa is seen as a particularly useful point of comparison, not only because of the

success of the anti-apartheid boycott campaign, but also because of the similarities

between apartheid South Africa and contemporary Israel-Palestine. Many BDS

supporters directly compare Israel's occupation of Palestine with the South African

system of apartheid. As The Guardian observed in 2006, “comparisons between white

rule in South Africa and Israel's system of control over the Arab peoples it governs are

increasingly heard. Opponents of the vast steel and concrete barrier under construction

through the West Bank and Jerusalem dubbed it the 'apartheid wall' because it forces

communities apart and grabs land.”18 More recently, leading figures of the anti-apartheid

struggle such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu have stated that the conditions in Palestine

are “worse than apartheid.”19 In an article entitled “Do I Divest?”, Tutu argues that

“yesterday's South African township dwellers can tell you about today's life in the

occupied territories... The indignities, dependence and anger are all too familiar... Many

South Africans are beginning to recognize the parallels to what we went through... If

apartheid ended, so can the occupation, but the moral force and international pressure

16 For example, see the special issue on “The Global Anti-Apartheid Movement” in Radical History Review.

17 Abigail B. Bakan and Yasmeen Abu-Laban, “Palestinian Resistance and International Solidarity: The BDS Campaign,” Race & Class 51, no. 1 (July 1, 2009): 32, https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396809106162. See also Salah Hassan, “Historicizing Palestinian Boycott Politics,” Social Text Online, n.d., https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/historicizing-palestinian-boycott-politics/.

18 Chris McGreal, “Worlds Apart,” The Guardian, February 6, 2006, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/feb/06/southafrica.israel.

19 Author Robin Yassin-Kassab, “‘Worse than Apartheid’ – The Movement to Boycott Israel,” P U L S E (blog), February 27, 2009, https://pulsemedia.org/2009/02/27/worse-than-apartheid-the-movement-to-boycott-israel/.

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will have to be just as determined.”20 The “Not in Our Names Declaration of

Conscience”, signed by hundreds of leading Jewish South Africans, similarly states that

“it becomes difficult, particularly from a South African perspective, not to draw

parallels with the oppression experienced by Palestinians under the hand of Israel and

the oppression experienced in South Africa under apartheid rule.”21 By underlining the

similarities between contemporary Israel and apartheid South Africa, BDS supporters

are seeking to de-exceptionalise Israel and disrupt hegemonic discourses that frame

Israelis and Palestinians through the language of moral equivalency and parity.22 In

particular, the comparison with apartheid South Africa draws attention to the settler

colonial character of the Israeli state. As Jon Soske and Sean Jacobs explain, “both

apartheid South Africa and the Israeli state originated through a process of conquest and

settlement largely justified on the grounds of religion and ethnic nationalism. Both

pursued a legalized, large-scale program of displacing the earlier inhabitants from their

land.”23

Comparisons between Israel and apartheid South Africa are of course not new.24

Already in 1961, the apartheid prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd triumphantly declared

that “Israel like South Africa is an apartheid state.”25 South African activists agreed, but

unlike Verwoerd did not see this as a reason to praise Israel. Israel, they argued, was not

only like apartheid South Africa, but also intimately involved in perpetuating their own

oppression. Throughout the apartheid period, Israel remained an important and loyal

ally to South Africa. In the 1970s, this cooperation extended into the field of nuclear

20 “Do I Divest?,” www.counterpunch.org, October 17, 2002, https://www.counterpunch.org/2002/10/17/do-i-divest/. In a Guardian article entitled “Apartheid in the Holy Land”, Tutu similarly writes: “I've been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so mich of what happened to us black people in South Africa”. See “Apartheid in the Holy Land,” The Guardian, April 29, 2002, sec. World news, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/apr/29/comment.

21 “Declaration of Conscience on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict by South Africans of Jewish Descent,” accessed June 18, 2017, http://www.mepc.org/declaration-conscience-israeli-palestinian-conflict-south-africans-jewish-descent.

22 As Abu-Laban and Bakan explain, the BDS campaign “as a strategy of resistance and cross-border solidarity, can be usefully framed as an anti-racist movement that contests a post-second world war hegemonic construction of state ideology, in which Zionism plays a central role and serves to enforce a racial contract that hides the apartheid-like character of the state of Israel”. See Bakan and Abu-Laban, “Palestinian Resistance and International Solidarity,” 32.

23 Jacobs and Soske, Apartheid Israel, 1. For a discussion of the failure to use the rhetoric of empire and settler colonialism in discussion of Palestine, see chapter 2, “Raw Cuts: Palestine, Israel, and (Post)Colonial Studies” in Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (Duke University Press, 2016).

24 For an historical overview, see Salim Vally, “Solidarity with Palestine: Confronting the ‘Whataboutery’ Argument and the Bantusan Denouement,” in Apartheid Israel: The Politics of an Analogy, ed. Sean Jacobs and Jon Soske (Haymarket Books, 2015).

25 Quoted in Vally, 43.

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technology, with Israel helping South Africa to develop nuclear warheads.26 This

friendship continued throughout the 1980s, and enabled the apartheid regime to work

around international sanctions. Israel also continued to offer diplomatic and military

support, sending 35% of its arms exports to South Africa as late as 1980.27 In 1987,

when the Israeli cabinet finally denounced South Africa's apartheid policies, a number

of critical Israel scholars had begun declaring Israel an “apartheid state”, some

suggesting that Gaza was “the Soweto of the State of Israel.”28 In the 1990s these

comparisons became increasingly common as human rights organisations began

denouncing the “Bantustanization” of Palestine. In 2003, Mahmood Mamdani and

Edward Said organised a conference at Columbia University entitled “An Anti-

Apartheid Perspective on Israel and Palestine.” As Mamdani explained, “South Africa is

a way of talking about Palestine. They are different and yet not all that different.”29

In sum, it is clear that pro-Palestinian activists, artists, and academics have a

long history of turning to South Africa to underline similarities and to explore strategies

of resistance. By emphasising the settler colonial nature of the Israeli state, these

activists and intellectuals not only disrupt hegemonic narratives that continue to frame

the occupation of Palestine as a Jewish-Arab ethnic conflict. As Salma Musa has argued,

it also opens up new avenues for solidarity, enabling “alliances between peoples

resisting oppression, linking Palestine to struggles against militarism, mass

incarceration, and policing, as well as indigenous land claims and struggles in North

America.”30 Nonetheless, the apartheid analogy is not without its limits. Defenders of

Israel have been quick to argue that the comparison is flawed, because Palestinian

citizens of Israel—unlike Black South Africans during apartheid—enjoy civil rights.31

26 Sasha Polakow-Suransky, The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2010).

27 Polakow-Suransky, “Gold Stones, Glass Houses,” Foreign Policy, May 10, 2010, https://foreignpolicy.com/2010/05/10/gold-stones-glass-houses/. See also the book by the same author: Polakow-Suransky, The Unspoken Alliance.

28 Meron Benvenisti, West Bank Data Base Project: A Survey of Israel’s Policies (American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1984).

29 Mahmood Mamdani, “Beyond Nuremberg The Historical Significance of the Post-Apartheid Transition in South Africa,” in A Journey of Ideas Across: In Dialogue With Edward Said, ed. Adania Shibli (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, n.d.), http://journeyofideasacross.hkw.de/resisting-colonialism-old-and-new/mahmood-mamdani.html.

30 Salma Musa, “BDS and Third World Internationalism,” Social Text Online, 2016, https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/bds-and-third-world-internationalism/. See also Keith P. Feldman, A Shadow Over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America (University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Juliana Hu Pegues, “Empire, Race, and Settler Colonialism: BDS and Contingent Solidarities,” Theory & Event 19, no. 4 (October 12, 2016), https://muse.jhu.edu/article/633272; Steven Salaita, Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine, 1 edition (Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2016).

31 For example, see “Why Israel Is Nothing Like Apartheid South Africa,” New York Times, March 31,

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While such arguments, at least to some extent, can be written off as ideological attempts

to deflect attention from the illegal occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, they

arguably do highlight the limits of comparative approaches. Indeed, in comparing Israel-

Palestine and South Africa, commentators have primarily focused on similarities in state

violence, and therefore limited their analyses to the time period before 1994. Because of

this they have often been prone to overlook that contemporary South Africa—more than

twenty years after the end of apartheid—remains one most radically unequal places in

the world.32 As Ashwin Desai and Richard Pithouse point out, “the government's own

statistics agency concludes that in realm terms: average black 'African' household

income declined 19% from 1995 to 2000, while white income was up 15 percent.”33

Despite a growing Black elite, white ownership and domination of the economy remain

intact; Blacks command only 10% of the economy, and on average earn six times less

than whites.34 Faced with permanent unemployment, informal housing, and high rates of

HIV/AIDS in the townships, the living conditions of the majority of Black South

Africans continue to resemble the historical disenfranchisements of the apartheid past.

While legalised and formally enshrined apartheid has come to an end, it is undeniable

that racialized differences continue to manifest themselves in all walks of life: as Heidi

Grunebaum observes, this is visible “in every sphere of society from who works in

restaurant kitchens to who owns them: who cleans the roads and sidewalks and who are

shop owners, whose children are cared for by nannies and whose children have to fend

for themselves.”35 The large number of strikes, social movements, and popular uprising

2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/31/opinion/why-israel-is-nothing-like-apartheid-south-africa.html.

32 There exists a large body of literature that have documented how the material conditions of the majority black poor have worsened in the “new” South Africa. Amongst others, see Patrick Bond, Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South Africa (University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2005); Ashwin Desai and Richard Pithouse, “‘What Stank in the Past Is the Present’s Perfume’: Dispossession, Resistance, and Repression in Mandela Park,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 4 (September 16, 2004): 841–75; Zine Magubane, “The Revolution Betrayed? Globalization, Neoliberalism, and the Post-Apartheid State,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 4 (September 16, 2004): 657–71; Thiven Reddy, South Africa: Settler Colonialism and the Failures of Liberal Democracy (Uppsala: Zed Books, 2015).

33 Desai and Pithouse, “What Stank in the Past Is the Present’s Perfume,” 843.34 Achille Mbembe, “Apartheid Futures and the Limits of Racial Reconciliation,” 3, accessed March 3,

2017, http://wiser.wits.ac.za/system/files/documents/Mbembe%20-%202015%20-%20Public%20Positions%20-%20Apartheid%20Futures.pdf.

35 Heidi Grunebaum, Memorializing the Past: Everyday Life in South Africa After the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Transaction Publishers, 2011), 124.

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—from miner's strikes36 to service delivery protests37 to university students movements

such as Rhodes/Fees Must Fall38, which I discuss in further detail below—confirm that

the struggle for decolonisation and the “long walk to freedom”39 continue, even though

South Africa now is “free.”

Two conclusions can be drawn from this. First, we might need to rethink the

nature of settler colonialism, including its relation to capital. In the literature, settler

colonialism has predominantly been theorised as a process that is distinct from

colonialism: as the elimination rather than exploitation of Indigenous populations, in

Patrick Wolfe's famous formulation.40 Nonetheless, and as the ongoing struggle for

justice in South Africa reveals, dispossession might be a constant feature of capital

accumulation, and consequently something that persists—even after the state has been

de-racialized and formal freedom attained. As we shall see in the next section, in South

Africa the racial, colonial, and gendered logics of dispossession have not so much

withered away as transformed themselves into structures more ideally suited for the

neoliberal present.

Second, the ongoing struggle for decolonisation in South Africa also reveals the

limits of a comparative approach that merely seeks to add up similarities and differences

(such as that between Israel-Palestine and South Africa). While comparative approaches

are not without merit, as David Theo Goldberg reminds us, they often “seem to miss a

crucial dimension for comprehending racial significance and racist conditioning in all

their complexity”:41 namely, the global colour line. In what follows I argue that a

relational approach—anchored in a global political economic critique of race and

36 “‘The Marikana Massacre Is a Tale of Utter Shame for South Africa,’” The Guardian, accessed June 19, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/26/marikana-massacre-ramaphosa-lonmin. For a detailed analysis of the Marikana massacre, see Patrick Bond and Shauna Mottiar, “Movements, Protests and a Massacre in South Africa,” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 31, no. 2 (April 1, 2013): 283–302, https://doi.org/10.1080/02589001.2013.789727.

37 Peter Alexander, “Rebellion of the Poor: South Africa’s Service Delivery Protests – a Preliminary Analysis,” Review of African Political Economy 37, no. 123 (March 1, 2010): 25–40, https://doi.org/10.1080/03056241003637870.

38 “South Africa’s Student Protests Are Part of a Much Bigger Struggle,” The Washington Post, accessed June 19, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/09/23/south-africas-student-protests-are-part-of-a-much-bigger-struggle/?utm_term=.f2884c9b15d7.

39 Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela, New Ed edition (London: Abacus, 1995).

40 See Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December 1, 2006): 387–409, https://doi.org/10.1080/14623520601056240. See also L. Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present (Springer, 2015). While both scholars recognise that the logic of elimination intersects with capital accumulation in complex ways, the secondary literature has often treated them as distinct.

41 David Theo Goldberg, “Racial Comparisons, Relational Racisms: Some Thoughts on Method,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 32, no. 7 (September 1, 2009): 253, https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870902999233.

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racism—demonstrates that there are lessons to be learned from the successes as well as

the shortcomings of South Africa's transition to democracy. Indeed, studying South

Africa post-1994 sheds light on the changing character of (settler) colonialism, and the

ways in which the racial, colonial, and gendered logics of dispossession continue to be

reproduced—albeit in a reconfigured form—in the neoliberal present. Ultimately, the

point is not just that Israel-Palestine is like (apartheid) South Africa but, more

fundamentally, that these spaces of oppression and histories of struggle are deeply

entwined and interconnected under racial capitalism.

The Limits of Rainbowism: From National Liberation to Neoliberalism

Twenty years after the end of apartheid, why has so little changed for the Black

poor in South Africa? To answer this question it is helpful to consider, once more, the

materiality of the global colour line. This is important, not least because the concept of

“racial capitalism”, while popularised by Cedric Robinson, actually derives from South

Africa; it was coined in the 1970s when activists and intellectuals debated the role of

capitalism in supporting the racial order of the apartheid regime.42 Anglophone liberal

scholars argued that the “colourblind” logic of capitalism, if left to its own device,

would destroy all forms of racial prejudice and discrimination. The free market system,

it was argued, would eventually replace racism—seen as a “social aberration”—with

new forms of social interaction, based on rational economic principles and enlightened

self-interest. In contrast, Marxists and radical intellectuals form the Black

Consciousness Movement, including Neville Alexander, Steve Biko, Harold Wolple and

a young Stuart Hall (in conversation with South African exiles living in Muswell Hill

and other parts of London), argued that racial apartheid was a direct consequence of

capitalism.43 Anticipating Robinson's Black Marxism, they insisted that racialization and

capital accumulation are mutually constitutive processes, and that race cannot be

understood in isolation from capitalism. For these radicals, this meant that the struggle

against the racial state could not be de-linked from the struggle against racial capitalism;

42 Michael Cloete, “Neville Alexander: Towards Overcoming the Legacy of Racial Capitalism in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa 86, no. 1 (March 10, 2015): 34–6, https://doi.org/10.1353/trn.2014.0032.

43 For example, see Neville Alexander, South Africa: Which Road to Freedom? (Walnut Publishing, 1994); Cloete, “Neville Alexander”; Derek Hook, “Retrieving Biko: A Black Consciousness Critique of Whiteness,” African Identities 9, no. 1 (February 1, 2011): 19–32, https://doi.org/10.1080/14725843.2011.530442. See also Sharad Chari, “Three Moments of Stuart Hall in South Africa: Postcolonial-Postsocialist Marxisms of the Future,” Critical Sociology 43, no. 6 (2015).

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indeed, South Africa would remain divided and unequal unless racism and capitalism

were confronted together.

The years that have followed the end of apartheid lend support to this argument.

In 1994, democratic elections were held for the first time in South Africa and an interim

constitution was passed. A year later the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)

was set up to help facilitate the political transition. Victims of human rights violations

were encouraged to come forward and share their traumatic experiences, as were

perpetrators who, in exchange for testimony, could ask for amnesty from prosecution.

By healing the wounds of the past, the TRC thus sought to build a “new” and de-

racialized South Africa—a boldly democratic and multicultural society, a “rainbow

nation” in Nelson Mandela's evocative phrase. Obscured by this polyphonic,

multicultural, and post-racial vision is the fact that apartheid was a socio-economic—

and not just political—system, based on the disempowerment, exploitation, and

dispossession of Black South Africans. As Sampie Terreblanche has argued, “the

apartheid system (or, more correctly, the system of racial capitalism) was deliberately

constructed in a very close collaboration between (white) business and (white)

politicians to create a (mainly African) labour repressive system on behalf of white

business.”44 For centuries South African mines, farms, and factories were dependent on

the exploitation of cheap Black labour. White South Africans were able to enjoy unfair

advantages in the labour market, accumulating wealth, land, and power, while

impoverishing the Black working class.45 From 1960 to 1983, 3.5 million Black South

Africans were forcefully removed from their homes and resettled into segregated

neighbourhoods. While formal apartheid was abolished in 1994, the spoils of this

system was passed on to younger generations in the form of white privilege. As Achille

Mbembe notes, this is visible in “monetary or property value, banking practices,

housing and land assets, educational resources, cultural capital, insider networks, good

jobs, a sense of self-esteem, dignity and superiority.”46

44 Sampie Terreblanche, “Dealing With Systemic Economic Injustice,” in Looking Back, Reaching Forward: Reflections on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, ed. Charles Villa-Vicencio and Wilhelm Verwoerd (Zed Books, 2000), 267. See also Achille Mbembe, “Whiteness without Apartheid: The Limits of Racial Freedom,” openDemocracy, accessed February 28, 2017, http://www.opendemocracy.net/whiteness_without_apartheid_the_limits_of_racial_freedom.

45 For an account of the systematized exploitation of black labourers under apartheid, see Colin Bundy, Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry, 2nd edition (Cape Town {u.a.: James Currey, 1988); Terreblanche, “Dealing With Systemic Economic Injustice”; Steven Friedman, Race, Class and Power: Harold Wolpe and the Radical Critique of Apartheid (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2015).

46 Mbembe, “Apartheid Futures and the Limits of Racial Reconciliation,” 9.

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The failure to engage with this long history of land dispossession, displacement,

dispersion of communities, and enforced resettlement has ultimately helped to normalise

present inequalities. As Michael Cloete explains, “[i]nstead of restructuring the

apartheid economy to meet the needs of the black majority, the leaders of the post-

apartheid state have chosen the option of a formal constitutional democracy, on the one

hand, and the capitalist system of its former oppressors, on the other, as the foundation

of the post-apartheid South Africa.”47 Despite a growing Black middle class, the white

elite retains control over the economy. More so than other issues, the question of land

highlights the incomplete nature of decolonisation: while the state no longer actively

colonises the land of Black South Africans, the vast majority of land remains in the

hands of the old white elite. As Neville Alexander, the Black intellectual and

revolutionary, makes clear:

“Ownership and control of the commanding heights of the economy... have remained substantially in the same hands as during the heyday of apartheid. It is perfectly justifiable to say that what we used to call the apartheid capitalist system has simply given way to the post-apartheid capitalist system. The jargon of those who make the decisions has changed (everyone has become 'non-racial' and 'anti-racist'), a few thousand black middle class people have boarded the gravy train and are being wooed into the ranks of the established (white) elite, but the nature of the state remained fundamentally unchallenged.”48

In spite of this, it would be a mistake to suggest that the nature of racial

oppression in South Africa remains unchanged. The transition to democracy not only

left existing inequalities in place, but also intensified the marginalisation and

exploitation of the Black poor. To see how and why, it is important to consider how the

birth of the “rainbow nation” coincided with the end of the Cold War and the

globalisation of neoliberal capitalism. In the years leading up to the fall of apartheid, the

ANC leadership increasingly turned to neoliberal trickle-down economics as the

antidote to problems such as poverty, unemployment, and inequality. Starting in the

early 1990s, the World Bank repeatedly sent missions to South Africa to persuade ANC

researchers and policy advisors to subscribe to economic orthodoxy. Senior ANC

officials were also sent to the Washington headquarters to receive training in the tenets

47 Cloete, “Neville Alexander,” 37.48 Neville Alexander, An Ordinary Country: Issues in the Transition from Apartheid to Democracy in

South Africa (University of Natal Press, 2002), 64.

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of neoliberalism and workings of financial markets.49 In 1996—the same year as the

TRC hearings began in Cape Town—the ANC subsequently became the first African

government to voluntarily ask the World Bank for help to implement a structural

adjustment programme.50 Within two years of coming to power, it adopted the neoliberal

macroeconomic Growth, Employment, and Redistribution (GEAR) programme, which

stressed deficit reduction, privatization, de-regulation, and trade liberalisation. It also

accepted responsibility for the $25 billion dollar debt accumulated by the apartheid

regime, and offered constitutional protection for the existing distribution of private

property.

While these neoliberal policies were justified on the basis that they would help

facilitate the process of democratising the South African state, in reality they have led to

a reconfiguration of the relationship between race, capital, and the state.51 Rather than

eliminating racism, the adoption of a neoliberal economic program has transformed the

apartheid economy—which was characterised by state support for industrial and

agricultural production, racialized welfare, and a split labour market—into structures

more ideally suited for the demands of global capital.52 Legally enshrined racial

capitalism under apartheid has thus come to be replaced by racial neoliberalism, in

which full citizenship, as David Thero Goldberg explains, is restricted to “the healthy, to

those who can pay-as-they-go, and to those who own property.”53 In particular,

neoliberal restructuring

“has transformed racial apartheid into a more generic and so supposedly less pernicious apartheid... Its racial arrangements are thus seen to fall within the parameters of what has come to be considered the global normal and so acceptable. But acceptable because the terms of recognition now exclude the analytics of racial articulation, because the state no longer takes itself so ordered even if the structural informalities

49 Sagie Narsiah, “Neoliberalism and Privatisation in South Africa,” GeoJournal 57, no. 1/2 (2002): 4.50 See Bond, Elite Transition.51 As Michael Omi and Howard Winant point out, neoliberal projects are ultimately racial projects; Omi

and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 211. See also David J. Roberts and Minelle Mahtani, “Neoliberalizing Race, Racing Neoliberalism: Placing ‘Race’ in Neoliberal Discourses,” Antipode 42, no. 2 (March 1, 2010): 248–57, doi:10.1111/j.1467-8330.2009.00747.x and Melamed, “The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism.”

52 As Terreblanche explains, “the economic system has been changed over the past 30 years from one of colonial and racial capitalism to a neo-liberal, first world, capitalist enclave that is disengaging itself from a large part of the black labour force. Although the black elite—both the bourgeoisie and petit bourgeoisie—has been adopted as a junior partner, the new system has retained a racial character; it is still a white-controlled enclave in a sea of black poverty”. Solomon Johannes Terreblanche, A History of Inequality in South Africa, 1652-2002 (University of Natal Press, 2002), 422.

53 David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism (John Wiley & Sons, 2009), 311.

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of the society continue to embed their legacy.”54

The South African white elite and the aspiring Black bourgeoisie have benefitted from

fiscal austerity, tax concessions, export oriented growth, the lowering of inflation, and

the liberalisation of steady exchange controls.55 Yet for the majority of South Africans,

neoliberal restructuring has meant widespread unemployment, deepening forms of

marginalisation, and the privatisation of basic public services such as transport, water,

electricity, health care, and education.56 20% of urban households now lack access to

electricity, and a quarter have no running water: 80% of rural households have neither.

In the last decade, there has been a rapid proliferation of precarious forms of

employment, including temporary, contract, casual, and part-time forms. This

vulnerable, non-standard workforce has grown so large that at present only 40% of the

economically active population has full-time employment; for Blacks, this decreases to

approximately one-third.57 As Desai makes clear, “[p]oor people are not perceived as

citizens who are entitled to certain basic rights, but as paying customers who forfeit all

rights when they are unable to pay.”58 Abandoned by the state, they have only

themselves to rely on for survival. In John Saul's formulation,

“[a] tragedy is being enacted in South Africa, as much a metaphor for our times as Rwanda and Yugoslavia and, even if not so immediately searing of the spirit, it is perhaps a more revealing one. For in the teeth of high expectations arising from the successful struggle against a malignant apartheid state, a very large percentage of the population—among them many of the most desperately poor in the world—are being sacrificed on the altar of the neo-liberal logic of global capitalism.”59

South Africa's transition to democracy thus demonstrates the limitations of a

liberation strategy that limits decolonisation to state reformation.60 While the transition

to democracy restructured the state and rejected white supremacy in favour of

54 Goldberg, The Threat of Race.55 Ashwin Desai, “Neoliberalism and Resistance in South Africa,” Monthly Review (blog), January 1,

2003, https://monthlyreview.org/2003/01/01/neoliberalism-and-resistance-in-south-africa/.56 Amongst other things, corporate taxes have fallen from 48% in 1994 to 30% in 1999; there has also

been a lifting of capital controls, and lower tariffs on imports. See Patrick Bond, Against Global Apartheid: South Africa Meets the World Bank, IMF, and International Finance (University of Cape Town Press, 2003), viii.

57 All figures are from Desai, “Neoliberalism and Resistance in South Africa.”58 Ibid.59 John S. Saul, “Cry for the Beloved Country: The Post‐apartheid Denouement,” Review of African

Political Economy 28, no. 89 (September 1, 2001): 429, https://doi.org/10.1080/03056240108704550.60 Clarno, “Neoliberal Apartheid,” 2015, 70. See also David Theo Goldberg, Are We All Postracial Yet?

(John Wiley & Sons, 2015).

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reconciliation, other aspects of decolonisation were sidelined. The result has been a

multicultural and post-racial discourse which puts the category of race under erasure

and, as Myambo explains, therefore “enables 'belonging' but not a material

redistribution of belongings in the concrete sense of possessions, (private) property, and

land.”61 The idea of “non-racialism”—a founding value in the constitution and the South

African term for post-racialism—thus naturalises and de-historicises ongoing forms of

material inequality, socio-economic marginalisation, and structural poverty. In this

context of historical amnesia, to advocate for land reform, redistribution of wealth, and

the undoing of structures of privilege—in housing, education, employment, and so forth

—is deemed akin to reverse racism. As The Landless People's Movement point out, in

“South Africa it appears if you challenge for land, you threaten the very foundation of

the miracle nation.”62

The Settler Colonial Present

The incomplete nature of South Africa's decolonisation has important

implications for the BDS movement and the wider struggle for Palestinian liberation.

Indeed, while South Africa now is free in the legal sense of the term—according to

international law, apartheid ends with the elimination of legalised racial discrimination

—neoliberal restructuring has placed important limits on the meaning of decolonisation.

As Cloete makes clear, structures of subjugation remain beneath the veneer of rights,

recognition, and rainbowism; “the ANC willingness to compromise with their former

oppressors... has ensured that the material systemic conditions underlying the unethical

practice of human exploitation in the past have remained intact as the enabling

(structural) conditions for the (im)possibility of the 'new' South Africa.”63 Consequently,

and in contrast to settler colonial studies—which, as I argued above, often has theorised

settler colonialism as distinct from colonialism; as the elimination (rather than

61 Myambo, “Capitalism Disguised as Democracy,” 65. For similar arguments about how a politics of recognition leaves the underlying structural conditions unchallenged, see Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Elizabeth A. Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Duke University Press, 2002) and Charles R. Hale, “Neoliberal Multiculturalism: The Remaking of Cultural Rights and Racial Dominance in Central America,” Political and Legal Anthropology Review 28, no. 1 (2005): 10–28.

62 Quoted in Grunebaum, Memorializing the Past, 38. Michael MacDonald, in a similar vein, argues that “under apartheid, racial nationalism mobilized opposition; under democracy, racial nationalism suffocates it”. See Michael MacDonald, “The Political Economy of Identity Politics,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 4 (September 16, 2004): 653.

63 Cloete, “Neville Alexander,” 33.

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exploitation) of Indigenous populations—the ongoing struggle for justice in South

Africa raises crucial questions about the evolving character of (settler) colonialism, and

the ways in which the racial, colonial, and gendered logics of dispossession continue to

be reproduced in new ways in the present. As Glen Coulthard has recently argued,

dispossession and exploitation are not mutually exclusive but deeply interconnected.

That is, settler colonial dispossession is not distinct from processes of capital

accumulation, but is rather a strategy which seeks to eliminate unwanted populations

while simultaneously accumulating land and wealth. In our contemporary era of

neoliberalism, these “relations of power are no longer reproduced primarily through

overtly coercive means”, but through the invisible hand of the market.64 Dispossession

thus understood survives the formal end of apartheid, but in new and updated forms that

suit the needs of the post-racial present.

How, at all, does this relate to BDS and the Palestinian struggle? As we saw in

the first section, a growing body of scholarship now describes Israel as an apartheid

and/or settler colonial state. While this literature makes a powerful case for de-

exceptionalising the Israel-Palestine conflict (arguing that it needs to be understood

alongside a host of other cases of settler colonialism), it has paid scant attention to the

link between race, capital, and land. This is problematic, not least since Israel-Palestine

—like South Africa—has undergone an extensive programme of neoliberal restructuring

since 1994. The Oslo Peace Process, which took the first steps towards a lasting two

state solution, was from the start a deeply neoliberal process; as Clarno points out,

“[t]he Oslo negotiations were promoted by Israeli business elites concerned that

political instability would impede their ability to attract foreign investors and multi-

national corporations.”65 According to the Palestinian anthropologist Khalil Nakhleh, it

was in fact the globalisation of the Israeli economy that pushed it towards Oslo.66 By

removing the existing barriers separating the Palestinian and Israeli economies, Oslo

was designed to open the markets of the Arab world to US and Israeli capital and, thus,

to lay the foundations for a process of corporate-led neoliberalisation of the region. As

Toufic Haddad points out, this vision was embraced by the international donor

64 Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks.65 Clarno, “Neoliberal Apartheid,” 2015, 69–70.66 Khalil Nakhleh, “Oslo: Replacing Liberation with Economic Neo-Colonialism,” Al-Shabaka, accessed

June 23, 2017, https://al-shabaka.org/commentaries/oslo-replacing-liberation-with-economic-neo-colonialism/. For a discussion of Oslo as neoliberal governance, see chapter 5 in Alex Lubin, Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab Political Imaginary (UNC Press Books, 2014).

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community. In place of political solutions, Oslo was based on “the notion that the

market's invisible hand would guide Israelis and Palestinians to peace, provided the

international community financially and politically backed this arrangement and

facilitated the creation of an adequate incentives arrangement.”67 Oslo thus saw the

Palestinian liberation movement being superseded by a Palestinian state-building

programme based on neoliberal institution-building; indeed, “Palestinians were to attain

national independence with the IMF, the World Bank, and the Bretton Woods

institutions, as well as the United States challenging economic policies and investments,

and with the occupying power, Israel, on their side.”68 Palestine, argues Haddad, has

effectively become a business, and it is clearly “a very profitable one, for any number of

engaged actors from donors to Western states.”69

This vision of a private-sector-led, export-oriented, free-market economy as the

foundation for an independent Palestinian state was also embraced by the Palestinian

Authority (PA). The strongest expression of this can be found in the Palestinian Reform

and Development Plan (PRDP). In 2007, under the leadership of prime minister Salam

Fayyad—a former IMF employee—the PA began to implement a neoliberal reform

package developed in coordination with the World Bank and the British Department for

International Development. Focusing on public sector reform and private sector

investment, the programme called for a 21% reduction of public-sector employment

resulting in the elimination of 40,000 jobs. It also imposed a three year freeze on public

salaries and ended the supply of subsidised water and electricity to refugee camps. To

promote private sector investment, the PRDP reasserted the long-standing goal of

establishing free-trade industrial zones, enabling foreign investors to take advantage of

low-wage labour in the Occupied Territories.70

It is here that the experience of Israel-Palestine and contemporary South Africa

begin to converge. In both places, neoliberal restructuring has reconfigured the relation

between race, capital, and the state, leading to the creation of a racialized surplus

population that can be exploited and expropriated at will. As Clarno makes clear,

67 Toufic Haddad, Palestine Ltd.: Neoliberalism and Nationalism in the Occupied Territory (I.B.Tauris, 2016).

68 Raja J. Khalidi and Sobhi Samour, “Neoliberalism as Liberation: The Statehood Program and the Remaking of the Palestinian National Movement,” MPRA Paper, November 30, 2010, https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/29642/; Christine Leuenberger and Ahmad El-Atrash, “Building a Neoliberal Palestinian State under Closure: The Economic and Spatial Implications of Walls and Barriers,” Economic Sociology European Electronic Newsletter 16, no. 2 (2015): 21.

69 Haddad, Palestine Ltd.70 See Haddad, Palestine Ltd.

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“neoliberal restructuring has generated surplus populations in both South Africa and

Palestine/Israel: permanently unemployed, too poor to consume, and abandoned by the

neoliberal state.”71 This process—which has the effect of pressuring workers to accept

lower wages, dangerous working conditions, over time, and so forth—is intrinsically

linked to the neoliberal restructuring of the world economy. As Nerferti Tadar explains,

“in order for national developing states and economic elites to become viable players in

the financialized global market, they must have at their disposal a population that can be

made redundant to any particular lines of industry as dictated by the sudden vicissitudes

of capital flows and that will ultimately shoulder the costs of fallout of any and all

speculative manoeuvres.”72 The structural shift in the global economy—begun in the

1960s and intensified throughout the 1970s and 80s—have made sectors of the working

class superfluous to the needs of capital. Expelled from the labour market and from

what remains of the welfare state, they have come to resemble what Tadar describes as

“forms of bare life, at-risk populations, warehoused, disposable people, urban excess

(planet of the slums).”73 In Gaza and the West Bank, official unemployment figures

hover at 27%, but reach up to 45% among university graduates and those younger than

30. Palestinians have thus come to resemble those who Ashwin Desai, in the context of

South Africa, calls “the poors”: those who exist at the margins of the capitalist economy

and “whose plight cannot... be meaningfully addressed or meaningfully improved within

the neoliberal institutions of global capitalism.”74

In South Africa as well as occupied Palestine, the violent surplussing of

racialized populations has given rise to a growing “security archipelago”,75 designed to

police the poor and protect the wealthy and the dominant—exemplified by the massive

expansion of policing and incarceration, border walls and detention centres, gated

communities and fortress suburbs. As we saw in chapter 3, neoliberalism has to be

understood as a simultaneous roll-back of the (welfare) state through privatisation as

well as a roll-out of new forms of interventionism and social control, meant to contain

and pacify racialized populations rendered superfluous by capital. In South Africa,

71 Clarno, “Neoliberal Apartheid,” 2015, 71–2.72 Neferti X. M. Tadiar, “Life-Times of Disposability within Global Neoliberalism,” Social Text 31, no. 2

115 (2013): 26, https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-2081112.73 Neferti X. M. Tadiar, 24. For a similar analysis with respect to the water poisoning in Flint, Michigan,

see Laura Pulido, “Flint, Environmental Racism, and Racial Capitalism,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 27, no. 3 (July 2, 2016): 1–16, https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2016.1213013.

74 Cloete, “Neville Alexander,” 43.75 Paul Amar, The Security Archipelago: Human-Security States, Sexuality Politics, and the End of

Neoliberalism (Duke University Press, 2013).

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neoliberal restructuring has been accompanied by a range of “tough-on-crime” criminal

justice reforms meant to secure urban space and police the poor. Borrowed from the

carceral technology and “war on crime” rhetoric developed in the United States, harsh

criminalisation has been framed as crucial to economic development in at least two

ways: first, by signalling to investors that South Africa is safe for foreign investment

and white commercial farming; and second, by warehousing surplus labour and opening

up a new market for private interests.76 As a consequence, South Africa's prison

population today ranks amongst one of the highest in the world.77 There has also been a

rapid increase in gated communities, fortress suburbs, and private security companies.

The private security industry has been the fastest-growing sector in South Africa since

the early 1990s, and now employs more than 40,000 people.78

In Palestine, similar processes of racialized (in)security are at work; since 1967,

Israel has imprisoned approximately 800,000 Palestinians.79 Palestinians currently face

one of the highest per capita incarceration rates in the world, with 40% of all Palestinian

men having been imprisoned at one point in their lives. Since 2007, the international

security company Group 4 Security (G4S) has been contracted to provide services and

equipment to Israeli prisons, detention centres, checkpoints, and the police. G4S, which

is the largest private employer on the African continent, also owns and manages prisons

in South Africa, including Mangaung Correctional Centre, the second largest private

prison in the world.

As we saw in the previous two chapters, this link between neoliberal economic

policies, racialized (in)security, and moral panics is by no means unique to South Africa

and Israel-Palestine.80 Indeed, in the United States a Black person is killed by law

76 Amanda Alexander, “Democracy Dispossessed: Land, Law & the Politics of Redistribution in South Africa” (Columbia University, 2016), 189–191. The link between neoliberal economic policies and criminalization has been noted by a number of thinkers. Amongst others, see Jordan T. Camp, Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State (Univ of California Press, 2016); Angela Y. Davis, The Meaning of Freedom: And Other Difficult Dialogues (City Lights Publishers, 2012); Loïc J. D. Wacquant, Prisons of Poverty (U of Minnesota Press, 2009).

77 “SA Prison Population among World’s Highest | IOL,” accessed March 4, 2017, http://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/sa-prison-population-among-worlds-highest-398070.

78 Andy Clarno, “Beyond the State: Policing Precariousness in South Africa and Palestine/Israel,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 37, no. 10 (August 24, 2014): 1728, https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2014.931984; Tony Roshan Samara, “Order and Security in the City: Producing Race and Policing Neoliberal Spaces in South Africa,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 33, no. 4 (April 1, 2010): 637–55, https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870903337318.

79 IMEU, “Israel’s Mass Incarceration of Palestinians | IMEU,” accessed June 19, 2017, https://imeu.org/article/israels-mass-incarceration-of-palestinians.

80 Edna Bonacich, Sabrina Alimahomed, and Jake B. Wilson, “The Racialization of Global Labor,” American Behavioral Scientist 52, no. 3 (November 1, 2008): 342–55, https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764208323510.

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enforcement every 28 hours; along the borders of the EU, gunboats, military aircrafts,

landmines, and border guards are similarly used to prevent migrants fleeing poverty and

violence from entering mainland Europe. To be clear, the issue here is not that the

militarisation and neoliberal governance of South Africa is like occupied Palestine or

urban Black America—although that might be the case—but, rather and more

significantly, that these different geographies of oppression are linked through uneven

and combined processes under racial capitalism: and as such they must be analysed and

resisted within a shared circuit. In the next section I return to South Africa to discuss the

Fallist movements, the ongoing struggle for decolonisation in present-day South Africa,

and the bonds of solidarity that are being forged between South African students and the

BDS.

The Art of Falling: From Recognition to Abolition

“To everyone who has survived pain, and trauma at the hands of the colonial legacy of Rhodes. I am sorry. That those are the places we must go to learn, that our black mothers, grandmothers, aunts, and sisters must sweat cents from their pores so that we can get better. We were the ones with possibility to become 'something better,' the promise of the rainbow nation, of women empowerment, of a new South Africa. Is this not why our foremothers have suffered? That we get better, safer? Oh, the liberal university we could not call home.

They did not know, that 'better' looked like rape scars and nights sweats filled with anxiety. It is not new either; black womxn have long learned to carry rape scars and night sweats. But it was not meant to be us. Freedom was not coming tomorrow. Tomorrow was here. Our blackness and womxnhood could no longer be used against us as weapons. The maggot-filled lies of inclusivity.

Whatever the fuck it was. Seldom better, it was never home.”81

In 2015 students at the University of Cape Town (UCT) formed a radical

movement that challenged the exclusionary character of South African universities as

well as the wider dream sold by the “rainbow nation.” As organisers and activists were

quick to point out, South African universities have historically played a central role in

creating and upholding colonialism and apartheid: indeed, under British colonialism,

81 Redacted, “#RhodesWar: Makunyiwe Macala,” The New Inquiry, February 5, 2018, https://thenewinquiry.com/blog/makunyiwe-macala/.

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universities such as UCT received extensive funds to study the “native question”; under

apartheid, the education system was highly segregated, with white schools and

universities receiving most of the funding—a pattern which continues to structure

higher eduction in present-day South Africa. Under the hashtag of #RhodesMustFall, the

students at UCT drew together a variety of individuals and groups marginalised within

the university community, including cleaners, cafeteria staff, and gardeners. While it is

the call to remove the infamous statue of Cecil Rhodes which has received most

attention by the media, #RMF organised around a much larger set of demands, including

the decolonisation of the Eurocentric university curricula, the transformation of a

predominantly white professoriate, the ending of exploitation of outsourced poor Black

workers, the expansion of financial aid for low-income students, and higher wages and

better conditions for campus workers.82 As the #RMF Mission Statement declares, “we

are an independent collective of students, workers and staff who have come together to

end institutionalised racism and patriarchy at UCT.”83 The call to decolonise higher

education quickly spread to other campuses, inspiring similar movements such as Open

Stellenbosch at Stellenbosch University, the Black Student Movement at the University

Currently Known As Rhodes (UCKAR), Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford, Royall Must Fall

at Harvard Law School, and the nationwide #FeesMustFall collective. As the movement

grew from #RhodesMustFall to #FeesMustFall and finally to Fallism, organisers have

challenged the wider narrative of the transition from apartheid to democracy. Speaking

to the lived realities of race and class in contemporary South Africa, they remind us that

the struggle to decolonise higher education is intimately linked to a broader set of

struggles: struggles against racial capitalism—including its reliance on institutional

racism, racialized state violence, and the violent production of surplus populations—and

the way in which it continues to structure everyday life in South Africa in new but old

ways, twenty years after “freedom” and the end of apartheid.

From its inception, pro-Black, Black feminist, and queer activist organisation

such as Black Stokvel, Queer Revolution, and South African Young Feminist Activists

have been central to the Fallist movements. The #RMF Mission Statement names

Radical Black Feminism, alongside Black Consciousness and Pan-Africanism, as one of

82 For an excellent overview of the role of precarious labour in universities and beyond in South Africa, see Andries Bezuidenhout and Khayaat Fakier, “Maria’s Burden: Contract Cleaning and the Crisis of Social Reproduction in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” Antipode 38, no. 3 (June 26, 2006): 462–85, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0066-4812.2006.00590.x.

83 The Mission Statement is available at http://jwtc.org.za/resources/docs/salon-volume-9/RMF_Combined.pdf

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the founding three pillars of the movement. As the Statement declares,

“we are not only defined by our blackness, but that some of us are also defined by our gender, our sexuality, our able bodiedness, our mental health, and our class, among other things. We all have certain oppressions and certain privileges and this must inform our organising so that we do not silence groups among us, and so that no one should have to choose between their struggles.”84

Alongside calls for free education and an end to the outsourcing of workers,

Fallists have also been calling out patriarchy, sexual violence, ableism and queer-

antagonism. At UCKAR, organisers published the #RUReference List, listing the names

of 11 men accused of rape on campus, which inaugurated a national debate on rape

culture in higher education. Around the same time Wits students initiated a naked

solidarity protest under the hashtag #IamOneInThree, to draw awareness to the high

number of women in South Africa who have—or will be—sexually assaulted and/or

raped in their lifetime. As these students make clear, race might be the “modality in

which class is lived”, as Stuart Hall once put it, but gender is all to often the modality in

which race is lived.

84 The Rhodes Must Fall Mission Statement is available at http://jwtc.org.za/resources/docs/salon-volume-9/RMF_Combined.pdf

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In rejecting the ideology of the “rainbow nation”, Fallists have successfully

exposed the limits of multiculturalism and a recognition politics which maintains

structures of subjugation beneath the veneer of rights, reconciliation, and formal

equality. These movements are practicing what Du W.E.B. Du Bois called “abolition

democracy”; namely, a politics which seeks to abolish all institutions complicit in racial

capitalism and bent on exploiting the “basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown

and black.”85 Indeed, and as Khadija Khan explains, “RMF/FMF activists have departed

from 'rainbow nation' ideologies of transformation altogether, and are calling for

complete reconstruction in the form of decolonisation.”86 Unsurprisingly, Fallists and

BDS supporters have been quick to make connections between their struggles; as the

BDS website declares, “Rhodes Must Fall activists are natural allies of the BDS

movement.”87At the UCT, students have repeatedly called on their university to divest

from Israel and to implement an academic boycott.88 A boycott is seen as essential, not

only for the purpose of furthering the Palestinian struggle, but also because it is “an

important step” in the project of decolonising South African universities. As a statement

from the students makes clear:

“At a time when there is university-wide consensus that UCT must commit to a programme of decolonisation, there is a growing understanding that decolonisation cannot simply be an inward-looking process, but must include a response to the global context. Any attempt by UCT to decolonise will fail at the outset if it disregards the systems of oppression in which it is complicit and perpetuates, beyond its campus boundaries of Rondebosch and Mowbray. The UCT academic boycott of Israel cannot be viewed in isolation, but must be seen as part of the broader movement towards decolonising the university.”89

Pointing to the interconnected histories of land dispossession, settler colonialism, and

apartheid, as well as of contemporary neoliberal restructuring and racialized state

violence, UCT students invite us to consider the freedom struggles in Israel-Palestine

and contemporary South Africa through a shared lens. These struggles are not the same,

85 W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 (Simon and Schuster, 1999), 16. See also Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy : Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture, 1st ed. (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005).

86 Khan, “Intersectionality in Student Movements,” 113.87 “For the Record, BDS Is an Anti-Racist Issue,” BDS Movement (blog), May 16, 2016,

https://bdsmovement.net/news/record-bds-anti-racist-issue.88 “University of Cape Town Debates Academic and Cultural Boycotts of Israel,” The Jerusalem Post,

September 29, 2017, https://www.jpost.com/BDS-THREAT/University-of-Cape-Town-debates-academic-and-cultural-boycotts-of-Israel-506305.

89 UCT Palestine Solidarity Forum, “UCT, Decolonisation And The Academic Boycott Of Israel,” The Daily Vox, n.d., https://www.thedailyvox.co.za/uct-decolonisation-academic-boycott-israel/.

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and yet they are interconnected—different fronts of the same war. In making these

connections, students are enacting a revolutionary solidarity through which a “many-

headed hydra” is brought into being—an internationalism that stretches from the

townships of Cape Town to the “open-air prison” in Gaza, from the mines in Marikana

to the free trade zones in the West Bank, and from the punctuated myth of the “rainbow

nation” to the ruins of the Oslo Accords.

Fig. 2: UCT students protest against the occupation in Palestine

Conclusion

Over the last few years the Fallist movements in South Africa have inspired

groups and activists around the world calling for the decolonisation of higher education

and wider society. Exposing the hollowness of rainbow ideology, Fallists have

challenged the racial, colonial, and gendered logics of dispossession which continue to

structure everyday life in South Africa. Present-day South Africa is “free” in the legal

sense of the term but, as Fallists remind us, decolonisation remains an unfinished

project: the transition to democracy not only left existing inequalities in place, but also

intensified the marginalisation and exploitation of the Black poor. As South African

intellectuals such as Neville Alexander and Steve Biko clearly understood, racialized

dispossession is a constant feature of capital accumulation. Perspectives that equate

decolonisation with state reformation ultimately overlook this link: not only are they

implicated in the reproduction of racialized inequalities, but they also help reproduce a

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colourblind discourse that places race under official erasure and therefore forecloses the

very possibility of addressing racialized inequalities. As the South African transition

makes clear, the racial, colonial, and gendered logics of dispossession are perfectly

capable of reproducing themselves even after the formal attainment of freedom and

democracy.

This argument has important implications for the BDS movement. While BDS

campaigners in recent years have turned to the South African anti-apartheid movement

to formulate strategies of resistance and conceptualise future visions, my analysis

reveals that there might be just as much to learn from the incomplete nature of

decolonisation in contemporary South Africa. Since 1994, South Africa and Israel-

Palestine have both undergone processes of neoliberal restructuring, which has

deepened existing inequalities and led to an increasing reliance on state violence in

order to police the racialized poor and secure the powerful. While the apartheid analogy

has been helpful for disrupting hegemonic narratives that frame Israel-Palestine as a

Jewish-Arab ethnic conflict—as opposed to a case of settler colonialism and, thus, as

part of a broader context of anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles—a more thorough

understanding of what South African apartheid was and continues to be opens up space

for a radical internationalism that links together the struggles against racial capitalism,

(settler) colonialism, patriarchy, ableism, and so on: for an internationalism that makes

“things fall apart” and that calls for a complete reconstruction of society in the form of

abolition and decolonisation. In the next chapter I extend this analysis by asking how

such ideas of universal history and total critique can be retrieved without invoking

Eurocentric ideas of progress and teleology. As we shall see, if the dream of

emancipation is to be retained, not everything can fall: we must also learn to float anew.

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Fig. 3: Scenes from the film Moonlight90

90 Available at https://metro.co.uk/2017/02/27/what-is-moonlight-about-everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-oscar-best-picture-winner-6475790/

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C H A P T E R 8

Universal History Without Guarantees

“Long before Karl Marx wrote 'Workers of the world, Unite!', the revolution was international.”

—C.L.R. James1

“The class consciousness of our epoch is not the sole prerogative of male, white, productive labourers. It remains to be constructed from the potential complementarity of

diverse political struggles which constitute the class politically at different levels. It provides a promise of unity which may only be apparent in the rarest moments of

revolutionary rupture, where we may catch a fleeting glimpse of the class for itself.”—Paul Gilroy2

Introduction

Over the last three decades, post- and decolonial scholars have drawn attention

to the dangers of universal claims. Thinkers from Edward Said to Gayatri Spivak to

Walter Mignolo and Sylvia Wynter have shown how moral-political universalism—a

form of abstract and eternal knowledge beyond time and space—is intimately bound up

with European colonialism and domination.3 From the notion of the universal stems a

teleological, progressive reading of history, in which European Enlightenment

modernity is seen as “a developmental advance over premodern, nonmodern, or

traditional forms of life.”4 The universal is, from this perspective, inherently suspect,

complicit with historical and epistemic forms of imperialism.

What does this rejection of universalism mean for the internationalism outlined

in previous chapters? Indeed, if we accept that “[t]he normative perspective that serves

1 Quoted in Reiland Rabaka, Africana Critical Theory: Reconstructing the Black Radical Tradition, from W. E. B. Du Bois and C. L. R. James to Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral (Lexington Books, 2010), 96.

2 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, EMPIRE STRIKES BACK: Race and Racism In 70’s Britain (Routledge, 2004), 306.

3 For an excellent introduction into questions of time, historicity, and world politics, see Kimberly Hutchings, Time and World Politics: Thinking the Present (Oxford University Press, 2015). For a critique of universal history, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton University Press, 2000); Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World-History (Columbia University Press, 2012); Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (Psychology Press, 2004); Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation--An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (February 3, 2004): 257–337, https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015.

4 Amy Allen, The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (Columbia University Press, 2016), 3.

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to orient the forward-looking conception of progress is justified” by a colonial

“backward-looking story about how 'our' modern, European, Enlightenment moral

vocabulary and political ideals”, as Amy Allen has argued, then what is left of the

emancipatory project of equality and freedom? Put differently, how might we be critical

of the universal, while simultaneously recognising that to outright reject the possibility

of universal history is to “read out of existence the whole strand of fighters like CLR

James, Claudia Jones, and Dr. King, all of whom very much believed in universal

projects and anti-racist demands”?5 Responding to these questions, in this chapter I

examine how, if at all, it might it be possible to disentangle emancipatory politics from

its historical baggage of Eurocentrism, racism, and empire. Connecting this to the

radical internationalism outlined in previous chapters, I interrogate how it might be

possible to retrieve the notion of universal history and total critique, without invoking

Eurocentric ideas of progress and teleology. To do so I put Susan Buck-Morss's re-

reading of Hegelian dialectics into conversation with Walter Benjamin's philosophy of

history and Stuart Hall's call for a Marxism “without guarantees.” As we shall see, these

thinkers not only allow us to centre-stage revolutionary, subaltern groups as the agents

of history; they also help us re-conceive revolutionary transformation as the

interruption of history, rather than its culmination. The insurgent universalism that

emerges out of this is neither abstract (in a Kantian sense) nor free-floating (as it is for

poststructuralists): instead it arises in opposition to the universalising thrust of racial

capitalism and the hegemonic narratives that accompany it. In Theodore Adorno's

formulation, “progress occurs where it ends.”6

I develop this argument in four sections. In the first section I turn to the groups

and movements discussed in the last three chapters, arguing that these seemingly

independent struggles—against white nationalism in Europe, police brutality in the

United States, and neoliberal apartheid in South Africa and Palestine—actually must be

understood as different fronts of the same war and, consequently, as different facets of a

radical internationalism from below. The struggles against empire, white supremacy,

settler colonialism, gender subordination, and capitalist restructuring are not the same—

but they are interconnected. Recognising these “discontinuous but related histories”7

ultimately points to the necessity of connecting—but not unifying—different struggles

5 David Roediger, quoted in Satnam Virdee, “Race, Class and Roediger’s Open Marxism,” Salvage (blog), n.d., http://salvage.zone/online-exclusive/race-class-and-roedigers-open-marxism/.

6 Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (Columbia University Press, 2012), 150.

7 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, 283.

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in a global struggle against racial capitalism. In section two I revisit the post/decolonial

debate on history and historicism in order to raise questions about the epistemological

underpinnings of such a project. If this is a universalist project—“the historical antilogic

to racism, slavery, and capitalism”,8 in Cedric Robinson's formulation—then how can it

avoid relying on the “master's tools” and repeating the moral-political universalism it

supposedly wants to challenge? In essence, how—if at all—might it be possible to

combine dialectics with dialectics, and universalism with non-Eurocentrism? To answer

this question in the last two sections I read Susan Buck-Morss alongside Walter

Benjamin and Stuart Hall, arguing that it in fact is possible to retrieve the emancipatory

project of equality and freedom without invoking the false universalism of the

Enlightenment. In telling an insurgent counternarrative, movements such as BLM, BDS,

RMF/FMF, and migrant activists remind us that there could have been, and still can be,

a different world. In bringing the world to a standstill, they turn the present into a

revolutionary possibility.

Different Fronts of the Same War

In the last three chapters I sketched the contours of a contemporary motley-crew

of “planetary wanderers” that enact a radical internationalism from below. Focusing on

migrant struggles in Europe, recent forms of Black-Palestinian solidarity, and the Fallist

and BDS movements, I highlighted that the struggle against racial capitalism—

including the violent surplussing of racialized populations and the consequent growth

of the penal and national security state—necessitates a national as well as international

frame. This should not be mistaken for the classical Marxist version of internationalism.

Indeed, this is not a perspective grounded in the notion of the working class as a

continuous and homogenous historical subject: instead it unfolds from what Paul Gilroy

describes as “discontinuous but related histories”, capturing the relation between those

“who, though structurally related, [are] not always geographically proximate.”9 In the

same way that Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism insisted on reading the plantations of

Mississippi and the factories of Manchester not as separate systems but as differentiated

and complementary parts of the same global economy, the struggles wages by these

different groups must be understood as mutually constitutive and dialectically entwined.

8 Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, 2 edition (Chapel Hill, N.C: University North Carolina Pr, 2000), 240.

9 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, 283.

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While BLM, migrant activists, Fallists, and BDS supporters recognise the specificity of

their struggles, their aspirations also exceed territorial borders. Responding to the

violent policing, surveillance, and confinement of actually or potentially rebellious

racialized (and gendered) populations rendered surplus by capitalist restructuring, their

struggles constitute different fronts of the same war. Together they form part of a

contemporary “many-headed hydra” that stretches from the streets of Ferguson and

Baltimore to the dark waters of the Mediterranean, to the refugee camps in Gaza and the

West Bank to the townships of Cape Town. To be clear, the struggles waged here are not

the same: indeed, the argument is not that occupied Palestine is like the Mediterranean

or the townships of South Africa. The point, rather, is that these struggles illuminate

each other in complex ways; that they are part of a larger network and circuit of

struggle; and that we are living in related histories. Consequently, while the movements

for Black lives in the United States, migrant rights in Europe, Palestinian liberation, and

South African decolonisation are not the same, they are interrelated and dialectically

entwined: through circuits of empire, labor, migration, and cultural and political

imagination. This does not deny the uniqueness and specificity of local struggles—after

all, Palestinians, Blacks, migrants, and Indigenous peoples do not share the same

experience of oppression—but it does emphasise their transnational character, and thus

points to the importance of connecting (but not unifying) different struggles, projects,

and trajectories under racial capitalism.

Such an internationalism is of course not easy or automatic: as discussed in

previous chapters, practises of solidarity can easily re-colonise and re-silence those who

resist oppression and become yet another re-enactment of power and privilege. The

problem, as Indigenous scholar Andrea Smith has argued, is that racialized peoples can

be victims of one or more of the logics of white supremacy, and simultaneously be

complicit in oppression through the other logics. The goal of a radical internationalism,

then, cannot be to homogenise oppression, nor can it be to establish who is more

oppressed. Instead, it must seek to understand “how anti-immigrant xenophobia, white

supremacy, and settler colonialism are mutually reinforcing in ways that actually

prevent us from seeing how these logics are fully connected.”10 The struggles against

empire, white supremacy, settler colonialism, gender subordination, and capitalism are

not the same—but they are interlocking. As such it is futile to change one system while

leaving others intact.

10 See Smith's introduction in Harsha Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism (AK Press, 2014), xiii.

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For scholars of a postcolonial and poststructuralist bent, such an emancipatory

project is likely to look suspicious. How, they might ask, can the idea of total critique

and transformation be retrieved, without invoking Eurocentric ideas about universal

history? To answer this question—and to counter the idea that the internationalism

outlined above is yet another version of Eurocentric universal history—in the next

sections I revisit the post/decolonial debate on history and historicism. Drawing on

Susan Buck-Morss, Walter Benjamin, and Stuart Hall, I show that it in fact is possible to

retrieve the emancipatory project of equality and freedom without relying on the false

universalism of the Enlightenment.

Universal History and Its Discontents

The concept of universal history—which sees the history of humanity as a story

about gradual progress towards greater freedom, equality, prosperity, rationality, and/or

peace—is central to Enlightenment philosophy. As Wendy Brown explains, “[f]or

Hegel, the world was growing ever more rational; for Kant, more peaceful; for Paine;

more true to the principles of natural right; for Tocqueville, more egalitarian; for Mill,

more free and reasonable; and for Marx, perhaps, all of the above.”11 Over the last thirty

years such ideas have been heavily criticized by post- and decolonial scholars. As

Dipesh Chakrabarty, Ranajit Guha, Anibal Quijano, Robert White, and numerous others

have shown, the idea that history progresses from one “stage” to another is intimately

intwined with European colonialism and domination. In Chakrabarty's formulation,

“[h]istoricism enabled European domination of the world in the nineteenth century.”12

By privileging and universalising the European path of development, Enlightenment

philosophers depicted Europe or “the West” as more developed and advanced than the

non-European world. As Quijano explains,

“All non-Europeans could be considered as pre-European and at the same time displaced on a certain historical chain from the primitive to the civilized, from the rational to the irrational, from the traditional to the modern, from the magic-mythic to the scientific. In other words, from the non-European/pre-European to something that in time will be

11 Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History (Princeton University Press, 2001), 6.12 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference

(Princeton University Press, 2000), 7. For a discussion of the entanglement of Europe's colonial project and the philosophy of history see, amongst others, Allen, The End of Progress; Guha, History at the Limit of World-History; Young, White Mythologies.

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Europeanized or modernized.”13

Hegel's account of world history, which is premised on the development of the

consciousness of freedom, offers a typical example. Africa, Hegel maintained, is outside

of history, and Africans constitute a “race of children that remain immersed in a state of

naiveté.”14 For Kant, similarly, non-Europeans—which he classified as black (Africans),

yellow (Asians), and red (Asians)—were less advanced than white Europeans, and thus

less capable of self-rule. As Thomas McCarthy has shown, Kant considered “cultivation,

civilization, and moralization a process of diffusion from the West to the rest of the

world”,15 through which non-European cultures gradually assimilated to European

culture. Marx, meanwhile, described capitalism as an intrinsic stage in history's path,

leading him to argue that the “country that is more developed industrially only shows, to

the less developed, the image of its own future.”16 Like Hegel and Kant, European

modernity was for him superior to non-European forms of life. Non-European cultures

were thus relegated to an “imaginary waiting-room of history.”17

The problem with such narratives of universal history is not only that they give

legitimacy to the civilising mission, serving as ideological rationalisation and

justification for Europe's colonial project. They also rely on a skewed reading of

Europe's own history, which elides the ways in which Enlightenment modernity was the

product, not only of Europe's internal struggle for liberty, equality, and fraternity, but

also of the creation of colonial empire abroad. As Fanon reminds us, “Europe is literally

the creation of the Third World. The riches which are choking it are those plundered

from the underdeveloped peoples.”18 The rise of industrial capitalism in Europe was

made possible by the enslavement of millions of Africans, the genocide of Native

Americans, imported Asian indentured servitude, and the extraction of natural resources

13 Anibal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Social Classification,” in Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate, ed. Mabel Moraña, Enrique D. Dussel, and Carlos A. Jáuregui (Duke University Press, 2008), 204.

14 Quoted in Naomi Zack, The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race (Oxford University Press, 2016), 254. For an excellent analysis of the role of race in Hegel’s philosophy of history, see Stuart Barnett and Robert Bernasconi, “Hegel at the Court of the Ashanti,” in Hegel After Derrida (Routledge, 1998).

15 Thomas McCarthy, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 67. For a similar analysis of JS Mill, see Beate Jahn, “Barbarian Thoughts: Imperialism in the Philosophy of John Stuart Mill,” Review of International Studies 31, no. 3 (2005): 599–618.

16 Quoted in Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (University of Chicago Press, 2016), 177.

17 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 8. He continues: “the European idea of history... came to non-European peoples in the 19th century as somebody’s way of saying "not yet” to somebody else.”

18 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (London: Penguin, 2001), 58.

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such from the colonies.19 Moreover, and as Edward Said demonstrated in Orientalism,

European Enlightenment was also ideologically dependent on the colonial project,

because Europe's own identity was formed through encounters with those that it

perceived as geographically and culturally other.

Critiques such as these have led many to conclude that the concept of universal

history is inherently bankrupt and best left in the dustbin of history.20 Such conclusions

may nonetheless be too hasty. As Chakrabarty makes clear, “there is no easy way of

dispensing with these universals in the condition of political modernity.”21 In fact, the

“very critique of colonialism [is] itself unthinkable except as a legacy, partially, of how

Enlightenment Europe was appropriated in the subcontinent.”22 The very project of

provincializing Europe presupposes some form of global historical narrative. For

Chakrabarty, the challenge is thus how to reimagine history while rejecting teleological

assumptions about historical progress, whose theoretical subject is always and

necessarily Europe. His proposed solution draws on Heidegger and suggests that there

exists a plurality of histories: next to the universal history of capital, which he labels

History 1, there are multiple, alternative histories that have their own integrity and

independence, and that resist easy assimilation into the historicist narrative posited by

Eurocentrism. According to Chakrabarty, these alternative histories—History 2—consist

of “antecedents” to capitalism, life-worlds that do not contribute to the self-production

of capital and that therefore have the power to interrupt it.

A similar idea is developed by Enrique Dussel in his work on analectics. “Ana”,

meaning beyond, refers to the alterity or otherness that lie beyond totality. For Dussel,

analectics thus designates a method “which begins from the Other as free, as one

beyond the system of totality.”23 He borrows this idea from Lévinas, for whom

exteriority names the “otherwise than being, or beyond essence.”24 Nonetheless, where

Lévinas sees this alterity as belonging to an abstract Other, for Dussel the Other is a

concrete human subject: the poor, the oppressed, or those that live in the periphery. As

19 For a classical formulation, see Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Fahamu/Pambazuka, 2012). See also Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Duke University Press, 2015).

20 Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo, “Universal History Disavowed: On Critical Theory and Postcolonialism,” Postcolonial Studies 11, no. 4 (December 1, 2008): 451, https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790802468288.

21 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 5.22 Chakrabarty, 4.23 Quoted in Michael D. Barber, Ethical Hermeneutics: Rationality in Enrique Dussel’s Philosophy of

Liberation (Fordham Univ Press, 1998), 27.24 E. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (Springer Science & Business Media, 2013).

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he explains, it is by listening to, and learning from, the voices that are located beyond

the exteriority of domination, that it is possible to formulate both a negative critique (of

the oppression of the system) as well as a positive critique (which posits an alternative

utopia, based on Indigenous traditions and world views).

While these formulations both yield alternative accounts of history, they rely on

an ideal of authenticity and unmediated experience. In that they are not unlike the

“ethics-first” approaches that we encountered in chapter 1. Where the ethical

frameworks of Rawls, Habermas, Butler, and others rely on ontological universals that

separate ethics and politics, Dussel and Chakrabarty instead seek to recuperate the

“authentic voices” of the periphery which, they hope, might be able to steer political life

in a more just direction. The problem, as Barbara Weinstein explains, is that

Eurocentrism “boasts a long tradition of situating elements of 'oriental' culture outside

of its historicist narrative.”25 By grounding their projects in the existence of a

supposedly uncontaminated alterity, Chakrabarty and Dussel therefore both “run the risk

of replicating an 'orientalist' discourse that would certainly represent no challenge

whatsoever to the eurocentric vision of the world.”26 In contrast to Dussel and

Chakrabarty, who both attempt to reimagine history from the position of exteriority, in

what follows I argue that it in fact is possible to retrieve the disparaged idea of universal

history without invoking the false universalism of the Enlightenment. To demonstrate

how and why, I turn to Susan Buck-Morss's provocative work on Hegel and Haiti.

Interrupting History: Unhistorical Histories and Counternarratives

Susan Buck-Morss has in recent years sought to derive a reconstructed notion of

universal history. Her work is directed against the colonial logic of Western

emancipatory discourses, as well as the relativistic beliefs in plural modernities and

multiple truths. As she explains, while “the postcolonial attack on Eurocentrism has

done much to rectify the colonial distortions of global knowledge it has splintered the

political response at the same time that the celebration of cultural difference has been

25 Barbara Weinstein, “History Without a Cause? Grand Narratives, World History, and the Postcolonial Dilemma,” International Review of Social History 50, no. 1 (April 2005): 87, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859004001865.

26 Weinstein, 87. Ofelia Scutte has similarly argued that Dussel's ethics of pure, uncontaminated exterirority presupposes that the oppressed have to stay in the privileged position of exteriority in order to be able to to speak to the established system of domination; “One must remain on the periphery if one is to receive the moral blessings associated with alterity.” Ofelia Schutte, Cultural Identity and Social Liberation in Latin American Thought (SUNY Press, 1993), 201.

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assimilated into neoliberal discourse and marketing rhetoric with surprising ease.”27

While Buck-Morss worries about the disappearance of a future-oriented emancipatory

politics, she is also aware that a return to a discussion of universality “threatens to

merge.... with the ideological needs of a newly constituted, global, ruling class.”28 The

problem can be summarised as: How might is be possible to rescue “the ideal of

universal human history from the uses to which white domination has put it”29 and to

advocate a “universal history worth the name?”30

Buck-Morss develops an answer to this question by returning to Hegel's dialectic

of lordship (Herr) and bondage (Knecht). In Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History she

argues that Hegel's dialectic of freedom was modelled on the real confrontation taking

place between the enslaved and slave-owners in the French colony of Saint-Domingue,

1791-1804. Accounts of the insurrection were widely available in European journals and

newspapers, including the German cosmopolitan magazine Minerva which Hegel read

regularly. Between 1804 and 1805, Minerva published “a continuing series, totalling

more than a hundred pages, including source documents, news summaries, and eye

witness accounts.”31 As Buck-Morss explains, this leaves us with

“only two alternatives. Either Hegel was the blindest of all blind philosophers of freedom in Enlightenment Europe, surpassing Locke and Rousseau by far in his ability to block out reality right in front of his nose (the print right in front of his face at the breakfast table); or Hegel knew—knew about real slaves revolting successfully against real masters, and he elaborated his dialectic of lordship and bondage deliberately within this contemporary context.”32

For Buck-Morss, this means that Hegel's master-slave dialectic should not be considered

a mere philosophical metaphor, inspired by the writings of other European intellectuals.

Rather it is a historically grounded metaphor, based on the self-emancipation of the

Saint-Domingue slaves. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit cannot be fully understood

without accounting for the black bodies that inspired it, or the European empires against

which they rebelled. By interrupting Hegel's narrative, Buck-Morss thus also intends to

interrupt the history of European modernity. The uncovered link between Hegel and

27 Susan Buck-Morss, “The Gift of the Past,” Small Axe 14, no. 3 33 (November 1, 2010): 174, https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-2010-033.

28 Buck-Morss, 174.29 Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (University of Pittsburgh Pre, 2009), 74.30 Buck-Morss, x.31 Buck-Morss, 42.32 Buck-Morss, 50.

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Haiti, she argues, subverts the Enlightenment narrative from within, rendering Europe

strange and no longer identical to itself: “[w]hat happens when, in the spirit of

dialectics, we turn the tables and consider Haiti not as a victim of Europe, but as an

agent in Europe's construction?”33 The answer, she argues, is a decentering of the legacy

of modernity that allows us to recover and rewrite, rather than reject, its universal intent.

In other words, by reconnecting the disconnected histories of Hegel and Haiti, Buck-

Morss demonstrates how the universal history theorised by Enlightenment thinkers must

be understood as a product of the colonial system—and not of Europe's endogenous

development. As she explains, “[i]f the historical facts about freedom can be ripped out

of the narratives told by the victors and salvaged for our own time, then the project of

universal freedom does not need to be discarded, but rather, redeemed and reconstituted

on a different basis.”34 Ultimately, by interrupting the very idea of universal history so

central to both Hegel as well as the wider Enlightenment tradition, it becomes possible

to formulate a counternarrative that holds on to a universal notion of freedom but which

does so without invoking the false universalism of the Enlightenment.

Buck-Morss's attempt to rescue the utopian moment shares similarities with

Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history. In his Arcades Project, Benjamin sought to

formulate “a historical materialism which has annihilated within itself the idea of

progress”, and which takes as its “founding concept... not progress but actualization.”35

For Benjamin, the past is never fixed nor finalised, but endlessly reconstructed in its

afterlife; what has been is always open to appropriation and erasure. To articulate the

past historically does therefore not mean to recognise it the way it really was or

happened. Instead, a truly historical understanding of the past seeks to “blast a specific

era out of the homogenous course of history” and to recognize “a revolutionary chance

in the fight for the oppressed past.”36 For Benjamin, revolutionary transformation is

ultimately an interruption of history, rather than its culmination. Freedom is not internal

to history—as it is for Hegel, Marx, and Kant—but is instead experienced as a rupture

that blasts the past and present out of linear sequence. Hannah Arendt, in discussing

Benjamin's work, referred to this as “pearl diving”, in which one “descends to the

bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the

33 Buck-Morss, 80.34 Buck-Morss, 74–5.35 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Harvard University Press, 1999), 460. For an excellent

overview of Benjamin's philosophy of history, see Brown, Politics Out of History; Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (A&C Black, 2006).

36 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: 1938-1940 (Harvard University Press, 1996), 396.

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rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths, and carry them to the

surface.”37 The sea here functions as a metaphor for the past, with the pearls being the

forgotten fragments and crystallisations of time that only can be brought to light by

someone—the pearl diver—who discerns meaning in them. Through its focus on pearl

divers, Benjamin's philosophy of history not only centre-stages revolutionary, subaltern

groups as the agents of history. It also re-conceives history as a discontinuity or

“arresting of happening” that transforms rather than continues linear history. In the

words of Theodore Adorno, “progress occurs where it ends.”38

Like Benjamin, Buck-Morss also attempts to “blast open the continuum of

history.” By rescuing the Haitian revolution from the oblivion imposed by the Hegelian

understanding of universal history, she too seeks to grasp the universal, “not by

subsuming facts within overarching systems or homogenizing premises, but by

attending to the edges... the boundaries of our historical imagination in order to trespass,

trouble, and tear these boundaries down.”39 In other words, by breaking with the silence

imposed by hegemonic narratives and giving voice to those sacrificed on the altar of

progress, Buck-Morss seeks to formulate a counternarrative that liberates “our own

imagination” and “inspire[s] action” rather than re-inscribes power.40 The history of

freedom thus conceived is not available to a priori reasoning: rather than a new meta-

narrative of linear progress (be it the Hegelian march to greater consciousness or the

Kantian universal peace) freedom is here understood as an insight that appears like a

flash.

Pearl Divers: To Know the Time On the Clock of the World

We are now in a position to return to the question of how the emancipatory

claims of the radical internationalism outlined in previous chapters are to be understood.

Indeed, how might it be possible to hold on to the idea of total critique and

emancipatory politics while also resisting teleological understandings of history?

37 Quoted in Dana Villa, The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 278.

38 Adorno, Critical Models, 150.39 Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, 79.40 As Buck-Morss explains in an exchange with David Scott and Sibylle Fischer, “the goal is to disrupt

the intellectual order by exposing the blind spots that hinder conceptual, hence political, imagination.” Susan Buck-Morss, “The Gift of the Past,” Small Axe 14, no. 3 33 (November 1, 2010): 174, https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-2010-033. See also Sibylle Fischer, “History and Catastrophe,” Small Axe 14, no. 3 (November 26, 2010): 163–72; David Scott, “Antinomies of Slavery, Enlightenment, and Universal History,” Small Axe 14, no. 3 33 (November 1, 2010): 152–62, https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-2010-031.

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Stuart Hall's formulation of a Marxism “without guarantees” offers tentative

answers. If the universal arrives as an interruption of History (rather than through its

linear advancement), then it becomes crucial to know “what time it is on the clock of the

world”41, as Chinese-American philosopher and political activist Grace Lee Boggs once

put it. Hall's work revolved around precisely this question. Like Cedric Robinson, Hall

sought to develop a materialist analysis of ideology, identity, race, and (post)coloniality;

and like Buck-Morss, he simultaneously tried to retrieve a conception of emancipatory

politics, without invoking Eurocentric ideas of history-as-teleology. For Hall, this

necessitated a sensitivity to the contingency of the present: what he called conjunctural

specificity. As he explained in his famous 1983 “without guarantees” essay on Marx and

the problem of ideology, the structure of social practices is “neither free-floating nor

immaterial. But neither is it a transitive structure, in which its intelligibility lies

exclusively in the one-way transmission of effects from the base upwards.”42 Indeed, the

“terrain” of the present cannot be defined by “forces we can predict with the certainty of

natural science” but must rather be assessed with attentiveness to “the existing balance

of forces, the specific nature of the concrete conjuncture.”43 Being sensitive to the

contingency of the present, Hall argued, thus means abandoning the idea that the present

rests on fixed foundations, and that it is shaped by a pre-determined past and pre-

ordained future: instead, the present has to be analysed in its conjunctural specificity. To

think conjuncturally—a framework he borrowed from Gramsci—was thus to remain

attentive to the social forces, historical factors, and relations of domination and

subordination which, at specific points in time, come together and conflict.44 As Hall

explains, a conjuncture is a “period when different social, political, economic and

ideological contradictions that are at work in society and have given it a specific and

distinctive shape come together, producing a crisis of some kind.”45 Conjunctural

41 Grace Lee Boggs and Scott Kurashige, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century (University of California Press, 2012), xiii.

42 Stuart Hall, “The Problem of Ideology: Marxism Without Guarantees,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. Kuan-Hsing Chen, David Morley, and Former Professor of Tropical Child Health David Morley (Routledge, 2006), 44.

43 Hall, 44.44 In Lawrence Grossberg's formulation, “A conjuncture is a description of a social formation as

fractured and conflictual, along multiple axes, planes and scales, constantly in search of temporary balances or structural stabilities through a variety of practices and processes of struggle and negotiation... It is not a slice of time or a period but a moment defined by an accumulation/condensation of contradictions, a fusion of different currents or circumstances.” James Clifford, “Travelling Cultures,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler (Psychology Press, 1992), 4.

45 Stuart Hall and Doreen Massey, “Interpreting the Crisis,” in The Neoliberal Crisis, ed. Katharine Harris and Sally Davison (Lawrence and Wishart, 2015), 57. As Hall explains elsewhere: “Gramsci

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analysis—the teasing out of the particularities of the present—was for Hall thus always

a political form of work, designed to reveal the possibilities for action and change in the

present. In David Scott's observation, the power of thinking conjuncturally is precisely

that “it promotes a conception of politics understood as strategic, as always earned

rather than derived, as always a matter of ideological struggle, as an ongoing 'war of

position.'”46

If there is a universalism to such a politics—and, thinking with Buck-Morss, I

would like to suggest that there is—then it is neither abstract (in a Kantian sense) nor

free-floating (as it is for poststructuralists). Instead it arises in opposition to the

universalising thrust of racial capitalism and the hegemonic narratives that accompany

it. In Anna Tsing's formulation, “[u]niversal claims allow people to make history, but not

under the conditions those claims might lead them to choose.”47 Understanding the

universal thus requires analysing how it is given content and force in specific

conjunctures. The radical internationalism discussed in previous chapters can be

understood in precisely this way, because it seeks to sabotage and interrupt the

hegemonic discourses that frame the present as postcolonial and postracial, and

capitalism as the inevitable endpoint of history. The struggles against police brutality in

the United States, white nationalism in Europe, and neoliberal apartheid in Palestine and

South Africa, do not so much change the direction of history as blast it open. Indeed, by

challenging progressivist narratives that present the contemporary capitalist world as

inevitable and irreversible, these struggles rupture the continuity of history that sustains

this order: migrants are interrupting established interpretations that see Europe as the

haven of democracy, liberty, and universal rights, rather than a physical and cultural

space constituted through the entanglements of empire and racial violence; Black

radicals challenge narratives of American exceptionalism by placing the struggle against

domestic police brutality within a global struggle against the many afterlives of

argued that, though the economic must never be forgotten, conjunctural crises are never solely economic, or economically-determined 'in the last instance'. They arise when a number of contradictions at work in different key practices and sites come together - or 'conjoin' - in the same moment and political space and, as Althusser said, 'fuse in a ruptural unity'. Analysis here focuses on crises and breaks, and the distinctive character of the 'historic settlements' which follow. The condensation of forces during a period of crisis, and the new social configurations which result, mark a new 'conjuncture.'” Stuart Hall, “The Neoliberal Revolution,” in The Neoliberal Crisis, ed. Katharine Harris and Sally Davison (Lawrence and Wishart, 2015), 9.

46 David Scott, “Stuart Hall’s Ethics,” Small Axe 9, no. 1 (2005): 6. See also John Clarke, “Conjunctures, Crises, and Cultures: Valuing Stuart Hall,” Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, no. 70 (2014).

47 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton University Press, 2011), 270.

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historical and ongoing colonialism; and Fallists call into question discourses that equate

decolonisation with state reformation. These “pearl divers” invite the return of the

oppressed: by seeking to redeem the unknown, the unremembered, and the unmourned

dead, they are re-conceiving the relationship between the past, present, and future,

without invoking Eurocentric notions of progress and teleology. Their revolutionary

internationalism is thus at once productive and destructive. As Benjamin explains,

“Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite

otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on the train—namely,

the human race—to activate the emergency brake.”48 Rather than the inevitable

culmination of a preordained and progressive history, the internationalism imagined

here challenges the current direction of history. By bringing the world to a standstill, it

turns the present into a revolutionary possibility.

Conclusion

In the history of Western political thought, emancipation has often been

portrayed as a story of gradual progress towards freedom, equality, prosperity,

rationality, and peace. In the words of Raymond Aron, “the dialectic of universality is

the mainspring of the march of history.”49 After the post- and decolonial critique of

universal history, what remains of this project? In this chapter I have interrogated what

it means to hold on to the dream of emancipation while recognising that universalism is

intimately bound up with the history of European colonialism and domination. Drawing

on Susan Buck-Morss, Walter Benjamin, and Stuart Hall, I have argued that it is

possible to retrieve the emancipatory project of equality and freedom without invoking

teleological, progressive readings of history. The universalism that underwrites this

project is neither abstract (in a Kantian sense) nor free-floating (as it is for

poststructuralists), but arises in opposition to the universalising thrust of racial

capitalism—including the way in which it depends on gender subordination, border-

making practices, ongoing primitive accumulation, the production of surplus

populations, and the growth of a global “security archipelago.”50 In enacting a radical

internationalism, and telling an insurgent counternarrative, movements and groups such

as Black Lives Matter, BDS, Rhodes/Fees Must Fall, and migrant activists remind us

that there could have been a different world—and, indeed, that there still can be.

48 Benjamin, Selected Writings, 402.49 Raymond Aron, Progress and Disillusion: The Dialectics of Modern Society, 1968, 217.50 Paul Amar, The Security Archipelago: Human-Security States, Sexuality Politics, and the End of

Neoliberalism (Duke University Press, 2013).

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C O N C L U S I O N

Strikers in Saris: Poetry of the Future

Fig. 4: Jayaben Desai at the picket line at Grunwick

“What you are running here is not a factory, it is a zoo. In a zoo, there are many types of animals. Some are monkeys who dance on your fingertips, others are lions who can bite your head off. We are those lions, Mr Manager.”1

With these words Jayaben Desai and five other workers walked out of the

Grunwick Film Processing Laboratories in North London. It was 1976. The following

two years would see a historic strike unfold, led by East African and South Asian

women workers, and against poor working conditions, low pay, misogyny, and racism.

The “strikers in saris”, as they came to be known in the press, not only demanded trade

union recognition. They also defied the racist patriarchal structures which reproduced

them as a distinct class category—as “Asian women”, suitable only for the most low

paid unskilled jobs in laundries, the clothing and hosiery industries, canteens, as

cleaners and homeworkers. In her chapter in the now classic The Empire Strikes Back,

Pratibha Parmar reflects on how Asian women at the time were conceptualised as

passive and helpless victims: as subservient non-working wives and mothers, “whose

1 “Grunwick Dispute: What Did the ‘Strikers in Saris’ Achieve?,” BBC News, September 10, 2016, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-37244466.

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problems are that they do not speak English, hardly ever leave the house... their lives are

limited to the kitchen, the children and the religious rituals, and they are both

emotionally and economically dependent on their husbands.”2 Such stereotypes, she

goes on to argue, were not only without foundation—indeed, a majority of the

Grunwick strikers came from societies where women worked both outside and inside of

the home, and had engaged in and supported anti-colonial national liberation

movements. Moreover, these stereotypes also helped to elide the real institutional power

structures, which subjected Asian women to virginity testing, placed them in dependent

positions to their men vis-a-vis the British state, and confined them to the bottom of the

ladder in terms of wages, long hours, and unsafe working conditions.3 As Parmar

concludes, “The explanation for the ways in which a particular labour force, i.e. Asian

women, were able to be controlled and consequently exploited in particular ways is not

to be found in archaic and sexist practices within the Asian cultures, but in the process

by which these patriarchal features are transformed by a patriarchal ideology invoking

common-sense racist ideas about Asian women.”4 In claiming the picket line as their

own, the Grunwick strikers thus not only confronted assumptions of Asian female

domesticity. Indeed, they also transformed the very meaning of class in 1970s Britain.

Their call for secondary picketing was heeded by miners, dockers, steelworkers, and

other workers from across the country, who flocked to the small alleys around Dollis

Hill tube station in North London where they joined the strikers in solidarity. While the

strike ultimately ended in defeat, the mass support Desai and the other strikers managed

to draw together demonstrated the power and, indeed, the possibility of building cross-

racial and multi-ethnic coalitions against racial capitalism.5

2 Pratibha Parmar, “Gender, Race and Class: Asian Women in Resistance,” in The Empire Strikes Back, by Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (Routledge, 1982), 249.

3 The Home Office regularly carried out vaginal examinations on Asian women to determine whether they were married or not and, thus, whether they were fiancées of men already living in Britain. These were based on the racist and sexist idea that Asian women were virgins until they married. Once settled in Britain, they were made dependent on their husband—the “head of the household”—who individually received all vouchers from the state. Consequently, “from the vert beginning Asian women have been discriminated against not only because they are black but also as women in terms of their legal rights of entry and settlement.” Parmar, 240.

4 Parmar, 260. Indeed, “The image of passive and docile Asian women has been used by employers, first to manipulate and control the women in their workplaces, and second to harass and intimidate them when they withdraw their labour.” Parmar, 258.

5 For a detailed account of the Grunwick strike, see Amrit Wilson, “Finding a Voice: Asian Women in Britain,” in Black British Feminism: A Reader, ed. Heidi Safia Mirza (Psychology Press, 1997); Ruth Pearson, Sundari Anitha, and Linda McDowell, “Striking Issues: From Labour Process to Industrial Dispute at Grunwick and Gate Gourmet,” Industrial Relations Journal 41, no. 5 (September 1, 2010): 408–28, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2338.2010.00577.x.

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~

In this study I have explored the relationship between solidarity, materiality, and

the global colour line. Why has the philosophical literature on global justice and

cosmopolitan ethics had so little to say about the racial structuring of the international?

What has this silence made possible, and what would it mean for cosmopolitanism to

take seriously the problem of the global colour line? In search of answers to these

questions, the thesis has made three distinct contributions—contributions which, as we

shall see, take us back to Grunwick and the strikers in saris.

First, I have examined how, why, and with what effect cosmopolitan discussions

of solidarity elide, neglect, and deny the role of race and colonialism in contemporary

world politics. I have argued that the erasure of race is more than a mere accident or

matter of oversight: cosmopolitanism is in fact an eminently political project because, in

disconnecting connected histories and sidelining questions of political economy, it often

helps to transform the responsible colonial agent into an innocent bystander. With that,

questions of accountability, guilt, restitution, repentance, and structural reform are

turned into matters of hospitality, generosity, humanitarianism, and empathy. The rise of

cosmopolitan thinking in the 1990s must thus be considered less a result of a steady,

gradual climb towards global justice, and more a product of a set of historical and

material conditions which in the late 20th century made it highly desirable for

policymakers, activists, and intellectuals to think of world politics as an ethical space.

The end of the Cold War marked not so much the beginning of a new global era as a

return to the North-dominated global order of 1492-1945. As the global

counterrevolutions to colonialism and capitalism came to an end and other

internationalisms were brutally blocked, the ethical discourses that in the long 19th

century had legitimised the colonial enterprise returned but in updated form. The result

was a transformation of the very meaning of the term solidarity: as Kant displaced

Marx, and discourses of empathy and suffering superseded the language of struggle and

liberation, solidarity would increasingly come to be associated with ethics—and not the

revolution. The cosmopolitan preference for abstraction, ahistoricism, and anti-politics

should therefore not be considered an innocent, apolitical choice; rather it is an

eminently political strategy that helps to uphold, legitimise, and entrench the current

unjust and unequal racialized international order.

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In response, I have—secondly—examined how a materialist reading of the

global colour line might help us rethink the concept of solidarity. The project of

radicalising and decolonising solidarity, I have argued, must begin with rethinking the

racial structuring of the international through the lens of political economy. While the

postcolonial focus on questions of cultural difference, Eurocentrism, and representations

of the imperial Self and the colonial Other has been helpful in bringing certain features

of the global colour line into view, it has also left other aspects to the side—in

particular, the material and socioeconomic dimensions of race and racism. Drawing on

Cedric Robinson and the literature on racial capitalism, I have instead theorised the

global colour line as a racial ontology that enables the hyper-exploitation of non-white

peoples and lands, while privileging others. Unwaged and less-than-free labour—such

as chattel slavery, racialized indentured servitude, convict leasing, debt peonage, and

gendered forms of caring work and reproductive labour—are not just incidental to

capital accumulation (as orthodox Marxists might argue), but fundamental to its

operations. In the neoliberal present these dynamics have been both systematised and

reconfigured: indeed, while racialized and gendered forms of domination continue to

pattern global politics, they have evolved to take on new forms, fit for the postcolonial

and multicultural present. In this thesis I have focused on two aspects in particular: first,

the hyperextraction of surplus value from racialized bodies and, second, the racialized

violence of the penal and national security state. From the ghettos of Los Angeles to the

slums in Cairo, the favelas of Rio, and the borderlands of Europe, a growing security

archipelago is quickly taking shape, designed to protect the wealthy and powerful from

those rendered surplus by the social and economic dislocations of racial capitalism.

Third and finally, I have examined what form of internationalist imaginary is

enabled by such a materialist reading of the global colour line—in other words, what an

internationalism that begins, not with universal ethics and moralistic abstractions, but

from a global political economic critique of race and racism, might look like and mean.

Undoing easy distinctions between “class struggle” and “identity politics”, a materialist

reading of the global colour line uncovers new political possibilities. Indeed, the concept

of racial capitalism not only compels us to think of racism, capitalism, and gender

oppression as mutually constitutive forces in the world. It also calls forward an

internationalist perspective, a political imaginary that links together the local and

international dimensions of white supremacy. W.E.B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction in

America, written more than 80 years ago, remains one of the most insightful texts in this

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regard. Exploring the relation between capitalism, slavery, and emancipation, Du Bois

argued that the American Civil War was a proletariat revolution within a bourgeois

republic; Black emancipation was “one of the most extraordinary experiments of

Marxism that the world, before the Russian Revolution, had seen.”6 The book finishes

with a call for an internationalist consciousness and revolutionary movement that

reaches beyond national borders and embraces all the oppressed and exploited peoples

of the globe:

“Immediately in Africa, a black back runs red with the blood of the lash; in India, a brown girl is raped; in China, a coolie starves; in Alabama, seven darkies are more than lynched; while in London, the white limbs of a prostitute are hung with jewels and silk. Flames of jealous murder sweep the earth, while brains of little children smear the hills.”7

Du Bois clearly recognised the connections between the struggle for abolition

democracy at home and the rise of global capitalism and US imperialism. The triumph

of white supremacy within the United States, he argued, enabled the creation of

imperialist projects abroad. The fight against white supremacy therefore required a

linking together of national and international struggles—not because these struggles

were exactly and everywhere the same but, rather, because they were linked and

interlocking. As George Lipsitz has noted, Du Bois's work thus “compels us to honour

the particularities of place without becoming subsumed in them to look for unexpected

alliances and affiliations across and within national boundaries without losing sight of

the systemic, integrated and fully linked economic, political and ideological practices

that shape exploitation, hierarchy and oppression everywhere.”8

Building on these insights, in this thesis I have argued that an internationalism

that takes seriously the global colour line needs to link together a variety of different

movements that often are considered as separate and “only” local. Through a close

reading of migrant struggles in Europe, recent forms of Black-Palestinian solidarity, and

a critical comparison of the anti-apartheid and BDS movements, I have argued that the

struggle against racial capitalism must be national as well as international, local as well

as global. My argument stands in direct contrast to dominant discourses that typically

6 W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 (Simon and Schuster, 1999), 358.7 Du Bois, 650.8 George Lipsitz, “Abolition Democracy and Global Justice,” Comparative American Studies An

International Journal 2, no. 3 (August 1, 2004): 279, https://doi.org/10.1177/1477570004047906.

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frame the struggles of migrants, Indigenous peoples, Blacks, women, and other

minorities through the lens of recognition and identity politics—and, thus, as devoid of

economic content.9 As thinkers in the Black Radical Tradition have long argued, it is a

mistake to write off such struggles as non-class, identity based mobilisations, confined

to a certain time and place—something that the Patriots and the Panthers recognised in

1969 when they set up the Rainbow Coalition, and which activists in Ferguson, Cape

Town, Palestine, and the borderlands of Europe embrace when they make connections

between their struggles. The struggles that I have analysed might appear distinct and

unrelated but are, in fact, mutually constitutive and interlocking, different fronts of the

same war against “the matrix of racialised empire and neoliberal capital.”10 Where

hegemonic discourses insist on individualising struggles, my analysis thus reveals the

importance of seeing them as part of a larger global framework. This does not mean that

all place-based struggles should be unified and assembled into a coherent and

homogeneous whole. Instead it points to the importance of understanding various local

struggles against racism, gender subordination, settler colonialism, and capitalism as

part of a global network carrying difference with a common cause; what the Panthers

and the Patriots imagined as a “rainbow coalition” and Hardt and Negri describe as the

multitude. In contrast to cosmopolitan visions—which typically unfold from abstract

visions of a universal community of humankind—such an internationalism is inherently

oppositional and centre-stages the struggle against racial capitalism, including the way

in which it depends on gender subordination, border-making practices, ongoing

primitive accumulation, the production of surplus populations, and the growth of a

global “security archipelago.”11

That such an internationalist imaginary is both powerful and possible is

something that Jayaben Desai and her fellow strikers understood when they assembled

at the picket line at Grunwick in 1976. In our contemporary era of Trump, Brexit, global

sweatshops, mass migration, environmental catastrophes, #metoo, racialized police

violence, and racist populism—where political elites and mainstream media continue to

separate the interests of “material” class from “ideational” race, pitting white workers

against racialized outsiders—such “a poetry of the future”12 is not only politically

9 For a classic formulation, see Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism, ed. Charles Taylor (Princeton University Press, 1994).

10 Harsha Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism (AK Press, 2014), 75.11 Paul Amar, The Security Archipelago: Human-Security States, Sexuality Politics, and the End of

Neoliberalism (Duke University Press, 2013).12 Karl Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (ReadHowYouWant.com, 2006), 6.

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explosive. It is also urgently needed.

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